Archive of Our Own ^beta

    To open, I’m not arranging this precisely as a professional would, because I am writing from the perspective of an Autistic person, recognizing things in a fictional character that I see in myself, and recognizing a few other things besides. Llewellyn Watts became my favorite character shortly after his introduction, because while Murdoch himself is recognizably autistic, he’s a STEM Autistic-- he tinkers with things and his flat affect is consistently so, and he follows rules religiously and his posture is exact and upright at all times, and I appreciate him as he is, but… I’m an Arts and Humanities Autistic, and most of the time when a fictional character is Autistic-coded, it’s not quite like me. That said, I appreciate so much that the show gives us these two very different characters, who both read as intensely Autistic, and that we get to see them interact, from the initial clashes to the quickly-built understanding.

    Moreover, I am a Queer Arts and Humanities Autistic, and my Queerness, like my Autism, is a thing which cannot be separated out from me-- nor can they be separated out from each other. So you can see how it means a lot, to have a character who I can relate to across both axes.

    So, I’ve split up my observations from a close rewatch, just in the way that it’s easiest for me to set it all out, and in a way I hope is clear for the lay-reader (I realized about nine pages in that I have no idea what a layperson’s understanding of Autism even is because I live in the home that I live in and I have the brain that I have). Working with a fictional character, whose life we only see in bits and pieces, and who can’t be asked about whether something is part of a pattern, or whether this behavior has a specific reason, means I am making the occasional leap based as much on media literacy as on anything else-- there are things which are included because they are important, there are consistent traits we are able to see, and there’s a lot that we can assume without being shown because… well, in the four seasons Watts appears in, he’s in about half the episodes of each season, sometimes very briefly. When he takes center stage, we get a lot of information about him, and when he’s in a scene in the background there are usually some tics to make note of, but we’re also forced to assume the kind of place that the things we see take within the greater pattern of his life offscreen.

    A note, also-- we meet Watts when he’s twenty-seven (or close to it), and he’s thirty in the most recent season as of the time of this writing (s13). There will not be a diagnosable concept of Autism until he’s about thirty-four, and at its inception, he certainly would not qualify for diagnoses under the original criteria. In his lifetime, no one is really going to be able to look at him and give him an accurate label-- Hans Asperger’s Autistic Psychopathy in Children won’t be published until he reaches seventy-seven, for further perspective on the evolving state of things-- but, people do recognize differences in him, and he recognizes things in himself, and it affects how he moves through the world, it affects his career, and it affects his social life.

GENERAL ABILITY

    To start with the positive, Watts is good at his job-- for all the social deficits he has, he still knows enough about how to read people in the specific ways required by his job, and his brain is suited to putting together the puzzle of a mystery. We know he has to be good at his job shortly after meeting him, because he didn’t get promoted through any skill at office politics. We also learn that he was promoted to detective likely by age twenty-six, to be given the assignment we meet him on, but most certainly by age twenty-seven, which is young. Watts, when he is introduced, is younger than the majority of the constables we see.

    So, there are things he’s more than ordinarily good at-- some of which will come up when I go into special areas of interest. But there’s one telling thing he’s more than ordinarily bad at, and that is fine motor skill.

    In his first episode, there’s a scene where Watts and Murdoch go to a purely social dinner, something neither of them is suited to, and in this scene we learn two important things. One, that Watts can’t always read his own handwriting. Two, that Watts can’t use a fork properly. In going over his notes, he needs help deciphering what he’s written-- and when we do see into his notes, in other scenes in other episodes, it’s clear that his handwriting varies wildly. We see a neat block print for short, concise notes, an untidy and illegible scrawl for notes taken down in more haste, and on occasion there’s something between the two-- it’s not a flowing script, though it’s more cursive than print. It’s just that each letter is laid out carefully and separately. This is the handwriting used when he means something to be legible to someone else, his ‘good’ handwriting, but compared to either other style, feels very painstaking. Given how much trouble he has, it’s not surprising that on his return to Station House Four, he immediately employs a constable to do his note-taking for him, but he goes back to taking notes for himself after Jackson’s death, and in scenes where he is part of a duo doing the questioning, he’s usually the one who takes notes.

    His atypicality when it comes to fine motor is most obvious with the fork or with a writing implement, but it comes through in how he handles other objects. The smaller the thing he’s handling, the more troublesome it seems to be, but he has a way of handling the telephone or holding a book which just reads as unusual, even when it’s not coming across as actively clumsy. Despite the clear shortcomings when it comes to fine motor coordination as a whole, it’s not an across-the-board thing-- it affects how he handles a fork or a pen, but not his ability to tie his shoes or knot his tie.

    Gross motor coordination is better than fine-- much of what might read to others as clumsiness is more posture and mannerisms. That said, the more stress he’s under, the clumsier he’s apt to be. We’ve seen him trip over a chair in the course of losing track of his limbs and the space he’s taking up. His apparent clumsiness is something he is aware enough of, in s11e1, to use to his advantage in obtaining evidence-- there’s a confidence in knowing his actions will easily be perceived as clumsiness when he might have been someone to be suspicious of, that speaks to at least some history

    To go back to the subject of Watts’ assiduous note-taking, he’s meticulous about getting those notes down, but not about keeping them. Organization is clearly not a strong point, nor is he especially attentive to the things on his person-- the way he is sometimes seems to be inattentive to what his own body is doing and where it is in space. Several times, he takes his notebook out only to shed several scraps of paper with further notes scrawled on them, and when that happens, he doesn’t notice that he’s lost them, even though the notes are something he does go back and refer to in the course of an investigation. He lacks any kind of organizational system. Why then the notes, if he does not or cannot keep track of them?

    Memory. Memory is another area in which his ability varies wildly. When it comes to trivia, quotations, facts, he seems to have an easy recall. When it comes to placing moments in time? At one point he forgets an entire conversation-- though at the time it had been a somewhat emotionally weighty one-- and also the whole span of time George spent away from Toronto, and reacts blankly when pressed about this recent notable change in the routine of his daily life. Things that have happened, when they have happened, the amount of time it takes for them to happen in, those things are less reliable than remembering objective facts.

    It’s unclear whether it’s purely memory or partly down to a mild face-blindness, when on his return to Station House Four, he has no memory of George, despite having worked closely with him not long before, and seemingly taking to him on a personal level, but either way.

    He also has occasional trouble with idiomatic language, which I’m listing here rather than under the ‘social’ category. I made note of there being a failure to understand idiomatic language in s10e11 but not what the idiom in question was. Arguably a social thing, since one is more likely to learn these things through conversation and human interaction than by study-- and study is something he has no problem with. He reads on a wide variety of subjects and even when they do not relate to a particular special area of interest, he does recall what he’s read when it’s pertinent. It’s also highly likely that his education is largely self-taught-- he’s an orphan from a working class background, and we can gather he lacks a classical education when he mentions beginning to learn modern Greek in his late twenties, with no foundation of ancient Greek from his school days. The things he knows are by and large because he was driven to seek out that knowledge for himself.

    There are things he’s very good at-- some of which will come up later-- which well outstrip what could be expected, but also things he could be expected to have proficiency in that he’s bad at, and it’s not only the disparity but the specific things with which he finds ease or difficulty which really hit home as being indicative of Autism.

SOCIAL

    Right off the bat, when we meet Watts in s10e4, he is decidedly un-politic. It’s not merely that he is blunt, even insulting, it’s that he has no idea why Murdoch would take offense at his pointing out his supposed failure, and his foot remains firmly in mouth throughout their first encounter-- and he remains blithely unaware. There is no aggression, there is no posturing, there is no territorial pissing contest, there’s just an inability to say the polite thing-- and an inability to pick up on Murdoch’s sarcasm. 

    His brusqueness is something that comes up again and again, with people he’s being introduced to, but also with people he likes-- it’s different from the intent to be impolite. He certainly can be impolite in earnest, he is so when talking to or about the others at Station House One, who he refers to (among other things) as ‘dullards’. He does not seem to be aware of SH1’s rampant problems with corruption, but he has no patience for stupidity. He is also rude as opposed to unaware when meeting Jackson, but he genuinely appreciates that Jackson is more than willing to push back against a superior who’s in the wrong, even when he’s that superior, and immediately reverses his opinion of Jackson’s intellect/worth. Even when he’s trying to have a Pleasant Social Interaction, he often winds up saying exactly what people don’t want to hear-- bringing up being covered in human remains to Murdoch in s11e6, offering Julia a list of serious diseases her upset stomach could indicate in s11e12, or just the basic existential crises he tends to throw at George and John.

    And he isn’t only brusque in word-- repeatedly, we see him fail to knock before entering someone’s office, we see him make ill-timed social overtures, we see him drop into the furniture in Brackenreid’s office uninvited or help himself to someone else’s workspace when he needs a surface, we even see him sweep things onto the ground in order to be able to spread his work out, and we see him take things out of people’s hands without asking, and take one of Murdoch’s inventions from his desk in his office, apparently out of curiosity alone. We even see him grab people in order to bodily move them rather than giving verbal instructions (notably to great degree in s11e13, and to a woman no less, with no sense that this could be interpreted as being in any way improper). Repeatedly, we see him snap his fingers to get someone’s attention, with at most a ‘with me’ before expecting them to follow-- in thirty six episodes, he only once turns back to see if he is being followed. The rest of the time he expects to be kept up with, and he addresses people the same way whether they’re a subordinate or an equal-- or a more experienced detective.

    It’s been mentioned in interviews that Watts is trying to act older than he is, having been promoted at a young age and being surrounded by people whose professional respect he needs, deserves, and does not always get-- there is a certain self (and more on this later, in a couple of places) that he puts on, that is not fully authentic-- a way he acts, to differing degrees at different times, because he needs a social mask. He’s not good at being inauthentic, in many ways, but there are pieces of a social mask that he does have down. There’s a version of himself that is for public consumption that is a little more headstrong, that tries hard to mimic the people he’s trying to fit in with, that expects to be treated a certain way-- and not the same way that he expects to be treated just as a person.

    He doesn’t have much tact and he has no filter, and though he can be honestly rude when his temper is in short supply, most of his social clashes are innocent miscommunication-- or undercommunication. He’s not only blunt, he also blurts out things that another person would know not to (best example being when everyone finds out about Julia’s pregnancy-- after Brackenreid, George, and Henry all make game attempts at not having been staring and not knowing anything, it’s Watts who asks when the baby is coming).

    Humor is another occasional shortcoming-- when he makes his ‘attempt at a witticism’ with Murdoch in s11e2, his flat affect (and the serious, work-focused nature of their previous interactions) leads to the joke falling flat-- though Murdoch’s own difficulty in perceiving humor adds to the moment. If he’d gone to Julia, who’s fond of bad jokes and accustomed to men who don’t emote typically, it might have gone over well. He doesn’t often attempt jokes-- though despite his inability to perceive sarcasm, he does occasionally adopt a certain tone. We get a lot of his difficulty with humor in s11e15 when he’s with Al Jolson (as well as another moment of difficulty with idiomatic language, where he offers up the fact that he once did find a needle in a haystack)-- he goes so far as to ask if Jolson is being facetious, after Jolson makes a crack about his ‘tremendous sense of humor’. He’s too earnest to follow the frequently flippant course of their conversations well, and gives too much weight to things that are meant to be joking.

    When it comes to social cues, he’s not adept at picking them up, and he’s not adept at sending them out-- we see it early on as he begins to form a working friendship with Jackson (indeed, it comes across as if his friendships with Jackson and George are perhaps the first actual adult friendships he’s ever really had), when Jackson is sometimes thrown by the difference between what Watts says and what his face seems to express. It’s much more painfully illustrated, in s13e5, the first time we see him in the company of other gay men-- with Detective Scott, he’s never quite able to communicate that he’s trustworthy. He doesn’t know the subtle signs he could use to show that they’re alike without saying as much, and he’s not quite ready to verbalize it. It’s a very specifically Autistic Queer moment, and a relatable one, to see him standing by, staring intently, not in a way that indicates any kind of attraction or romantic interest, but an unspoken (or unspeakable) kinship-- a desire to be recognized, when one can’t put out the signs that would allow someone else to recognize you. And with Jack, who he does have a romantic interest in, who he makes the decision to pursue at the very least a social relationship with, to stand there not recognizing the blatant flirtation aimed back his way-- to display not just the hesitation he might feel over his choice regarding the law and his potential violation of it, but the fear of rejection, from a man who is very much not rejecting him. Speaking of the Autistic Queer problem of not being able to reliably follow subtle social signals, there’s a moment in s12e17 where it very much feels like for a moment, he thinks a man (an attractive man, of roughly his own age, with whom he shares one interest) is being particularly nice to him, and the way that he’s disappointed when that’s not what’s happening is a whole Mood.

    The other problem, with this inability to read others’ intent with any reliability, in social situations, is that there’s a naivete. Despite the suspicion of wrongdoing that often goes hand in hand with his profession, he places a LOT of faith in people, deserved or undeserved. When he finds his sister again, after she had been missing from him for fifteen years, he immediately accepted the story she gave him about their separation, only to be crushed by the betrayal of learning she had lied to him-- also telling, learning she had lied to him about why she had been missing and why she had not found him led to his changing his mental categorizing of her from Trustworthy Person to Untrustworthy Person, and to his suspecting her of murder. If she could lie to her brother about something important, how is he to believe she wouldn’t also kill a man? He’s also been willing to work with Louise Cherry, despite being explicitly warned that she wasn’t trustworthy (to be fair, in one instance, his handwave-y assertion that people can’t be judged by their words or actions seems less an indication of his trust in her, and more a sign of his desperation to be outdoors and on the move instead of trapped in the office staring at the blackboard with Murdoch).

    More serious misplacing of trust occurs in s11e9-- he has an incredible amount of empathy for the little girl he refers to as an orphan after her mother’s arrest. Because of his own past, he sees a lot of himself in her situation before he begins to suspect that she’s the real killer. Even when that suspicion sets in, he is unable to treat her with real suspicion, at the risk of his life. And, even more tragically, in s13e17-18, when working with Detective Edwards, he is empathetic and he is clearly working to be kind-- Edwards’ career is starting at Station House One, where Watts’ own career started out, and it’s a work environment he knows as unfriendly. Edwards is a young widower, much like Jackson. Edwards speaks well of the work he puts into their shared case, and though he displays some homophobia, that’s not new and it’s not unexpected-- it’s not any worse, in fact, than what he’s heard from Brackenreid, a man he normally has trust, respect, and affection for. From his limited viewpoint, it’s easy to interpret Edwards as friendly rather than merely civil and socially adept, right up until he isn’t, and while there’s betrayal and hurt and then anger, there’s also real confusion. He isn’t sure how to proceed when Edwards breaks from the ‘script’ he’s envisioned, except to proceed with the next item in his own script, and it is painful to see the way that the real hard work that he’s put into being friendly-- even through the times he has been stressed out and tired, and hurt by Edwards’ earlier casual homophobia, and taken by surprise-- thrown in his face so viciously, while he is at a loss with how to proceed.

    It’s not only the social deficits which are telling, though-- it’s the people with whom Watts feels the most socially at ease, the people he’s more likely to seek out and more likely to feel confident with. While he’s not socially at ease with peers and displays more disdain than anything for the upper classes, and while he’s not adept at social communication with most people, he’s at his best and his easiest with tend to be outsiders and children. He has a soft spot for children in general (and orphans more specifically), and among adults (outside of those we see him develop friendships with over time at Station House Four) he seems to find more of a comfort zone when he’s talking to other minorities-- before we as an audience know he is one, and perhaps before he knows it himself, given it’s debatable whether he’s aware of his sexuality prior to his short-lived romance with Fiona Faust or if he discovers himself in part through his experience with her. It’s not unheard of for the intersection of Queerness and Autism to lead to difficulty in parsing what attraction is and when you feel it. It’s not only a matter of getting along with Murdoch and with the bug expert in s12e8, being able to be more comfortable around Jolson in s11e15 or a desire to connect with the men in s13e5, all of whom are like him in one way or another-- he also immediately treats Violet Hart as a social equal, and accepts her reasoning as to why he can and should view her as a qualified expert in her field. He’s also more at ease in Greektown than usual, where he seems to have a grasp of what the social rules are in a way he’s never managed in the social circles he’s spent most of his time with. The only commonality necessary is the experience of being an outsider, something he knows he is even before he has any words for why or how. It’s with children in particular, and with witnesses or suspects who are themselves in some way vulnerable or disenfranchised, that he tends to make himself physically small, rather than standing-- with child witnesses, he crouches down until he’s at that child’s level at most. With other people he might stand, or loom, or pay little attention to how his posture may be interpreted, but he is very conscious of what might make a child more or less comfortable.

    To go back to what and who he’s not comfortable with, the big one seems to be aggressive men. He frequently flinches back from displays of even mild aggression, and not only from men who are a threat to him, but from men he trusts (as with Brackenreid in s13e5) or from men he would tower over if he stood up straight-- from a Watsonian perspective, this is in line with what we learn about his youth, that he was the adopted older brother and would-be protector to two disabled boys who were frequent targets of particularly cruel bullying, that we can assume this made him a target in his own right. Frankly, with his lack of social acumen and the way kids can pick out their gay peers for bullying before any of them have a real concept of what gay is, we didn’t need to learn that to assume a history of bullying, but we have it. More on response to aggression later.

    He normally rolls with people disliking him-- he generally treats it as something unimportant, and unless there’s been a sign of friendliness beforehand, not as something unexpected. He’s merely resigned when he reports in s10e11 that he’s been kicked out of Station House One-- not fired, merely disinvited from working in that building-- for personality reasons. He owns that the personality causing problems is mostly his, and it’s not until the end of the season that he puts in for an official transfer to Station House Four, where he’s taken to doing at least some of his work in the meantime. He normally takes more offense at a slight to someone else than he will at one to himself-- the only notable exception is in s12e17, when Violet laughs at him (at this point, they are on friendly terms, at least from his standpoint-- he has volunteered to help her study detection skills, they went to visit his bug friend together)-- he asks twice as to what about him is so funny, and is visibly upset by being told it’s nothing when he knows he’s being laughed at. The strength of his response may be due to their prior relationship, to his having trusted her not to laugh at him. It may also be merely that it’s a sore spot-- as it is for many Autistic people-- to perceive oneself as the butt of a joke that you don’t understand, and which no one will explain to you, which people will deny to your face that they’ve made. (he does not, however, seem to pick up on Brackenreid doing a literal impression of him in s11e9)

    He has difficulty following people’s meaning, moreso earlier on-- not only when non-literal language is used, but just when there’s any ambiguity. For example, in s10e15, when Freddie tells him he should respectfully ask for the information he wants, she’s referring to the women in the house she’s infiltrated, but he immediately asks her more politely if she can give him said information. (this is also the episode in which he and Murdoch accuse each other of lacking subtlety-- just the first of the moments in which there’s an overlap in the way they each present as Autistic… and just one of the moments in which they each view the other as the odd one, totally oblivious to any similarity)

    Watts is not by nature an antisocial creature in spite of these social deficits-- he has boatloads of empathy, for strangers as easily as for friends. He just doesn’t know how or when to express that empathy. Daniel Maslany does a really wonderful job of making his expressions readable enough to an audience so that you can see a lot of feeling in him, while still coming off as atypical in the way he expresses himself. He cares deeply about people who are suffering, both in the concrete and the abstract, the problem is connecting one on one with them. In crowd scenes, he often seems to enjoy being on the periphery where others are enjoying themselves, even if he doesn’t directly interact, and over the four years he spends at Station House Four, he makes great strides in how to interact with those he calls friend, if not with people in general. 

Early on, he has difficulty with compliments, seemingly as a concept-- he doesn’t like having his objective assessment of Julia’s beauty mistaken for one (in fact, both with her and with Freddie Pink, he immediately follows up his objective assessment of beauty with a criticism towards something the woman in question is wearing-- whether this is a question of not having any filter, of wanting to effectively make it clear that he is not being complimentary, or if it has less to do with Autism and more to do with being gay and really wanting to make it clear he’s not being complimentary in a flirtatious manner, I could not say, but it comes up on the two occasions. He also does not want Julia to compliment him -- when she says that she finds him delightful, he’s quick to point out that being delightful does not make him more effective at his job and is not an important trait. While he doesn’t necessarily get good at subjective compliments, he at least gets better at talking to people. Also fair to note that in his first meeting with Julia, he sees no reason why a woman would be uncomfortable having a strange man stare fixedly and openly at her at length-- and if someone were to bring up reasons a woman might be uncomfortable, it’s as likely he would dismiss them as irrelevant, given his own motives are entirely free from sexual or romantic interest.

    With Murdoch, we see them go from a sort of mutual disrespect in s10e4 to acting like siblings in s13e16-- and it’s somewhere between the start of s10 and the midpoint of s11 that he begins looking to Murdoch for guidance. The fact that he turns towards Murdoch for guidance specifically in social situations is on the one hand pretty funny, Murdoch also wouldn’t know what to do with a social cue if it bit him. On the other hand, it makes sense-- trying to take social cues from a neurotypical would be difficult to parse, exhausting, they would move too quickly and without a clearly followable pattern-- because Murdoch also learned social skills as a set of Rules rather than organically, watching him for cues is a little friendlier, it’s a clearer roadmap (one clear-- and understandable-- early example is s11e12, when they’re on Murdoch’s home turf, so to speak, in the catholic church, but my favorite example is s13e8, where he enlists Murdoch’s help in dealing with keeping John Brackenreid’s tryst with the victim a secret from his parents). Speaking of John, he goes from staring at him uncomfortably from across a desk and giving him occasional existential crises, to trusting him and treating him less as mentor-to-mentee and more as an older brother-- not unfitting, considering he goes from the new weird detective to Brackenreid’s ‘work son’ over the same span of time. He forms a close friendship with George, and even over the course of a single season he managed to bond with Jackson over their shared experience with loss and grief. 

    There is also his relationship with Jack, and the parts of him that being involved in a serious romance with someone he’s attracted to brings out-- here, there’s another intersection between the tension and stress that comes from navigating the world he lives in as Autistic, and doing so as a gay man. He has reason enough to feel uneasy, and though he carries himself with a certain amount of stress, he is confident or at least unbothered in most situations. His life is so much focused around his career, the arena in which he most knows and trusts in his worth, but he also rarely treats social situations as being high-stakes. He might make social overtures but be ready to walk away at the first sign of difficulty, as in s10e4’s dinner with Murdoch. With Jack, suddenly not only are the rules not the same as with other social interactions, but he assigns value to those interactions very early on. At the end of s13e5, he’s still incredibly anxious to be liked and still uncertain whether or not he is/will be, but in s13e9 (and beyond) we see him comfortable-- not free from anxiety in general, but free from anxiety about the relationship, with more open posture and expression when the two are together (in fact, they both develop more open posture and expression with each other-- Jack goes from having a very tight jaw and smiling more with his eyes than his mouth, to smiling with his entire face, and his posture is on the whole less defensive when they’re together). There is, refreshingly, not any sense that he tries to be his ‘best self’ in an inauthentic way-- no Normal Man Face, no put-on worldliness, no social mask, except for when the two are with someone else in front of whom they have to pretend to be more casual acquaintances (also worth noting that he has some difficulty with code-switching, demonstrated in s13e17-- when he’s not geared up to put on an act, he finds it difficult if not distressing to have to quickly change gears and put up the acceptable front).

    With the people who know him, he learns how to behave, and they learn how to read him-- and he comes to prioritize people’s emotions more the closer he grows to the others, going from his assertion that emotion is at best worthless, to viewing his previous self as callous, as he’s learned more about communicating emotion-- and how to process his own. 

    It’s very worth noting that even with all the difficulties Watts has in navigating social interaction, two of his key traits are related to his relationship with others-- he’s incredibly loyal, and he’s protective to the point of self-sacrifice. He displays these traits in relation to the sister he’s spent over half his life searching for, even as he discovers he cannot forgive the degree to which she’s betrayed him, and in relation to his adopted brothers, he displays them in relation to witnesses from cases he’s worked in the past, and he also displays them in the relationships we see him form on screen, with the others at Station House Four and with Jack. In fact, it’s in these relationships that we see just how readily he forms his attachments. He works a handful of cases with Station House Four and has yet to request a proper transfer before he’s willing to put his career and his life on the line not only because it’s what’s Just but because these are his friends-- because by s11e1 he has already lost perhaps his closest friend. He meets Jack for the first time in s13e5 and by the end of the season risks not only the loss of his job but a prison sentence (technically he is admitting guilt to a capital crime, though there are no recorded cases of it ever being enforced as such, and this is at least close to the time that the indecency laws would be rewritten to officially remove capital punishment from the books, but still, I mean damn), on the slightest chance of saving him (Jack is not facing being charged with a capital crime, by the way, and he’s in on an offense that likely won’t go to court because of the lack of solid evidence-- but being formally charged  based on suspicion and on his prior record would most likely still ruin his reputation and his livelihood even without a prison sentence, and also he has suffered enough). Once this man decides to care about you, he’s pretty much all in unless he finds out you purposefully took actions which would scar him for life without any consideration to his feelings. And even then, in the case of his sister, he looks at it from her side.

MANNERISMS

    Strap in, because there’s a lot here, between verbal and physical stims (more on stims in the next section) and tics, frequent gestures, posture, and general physicality. 

    Starting with the first things you notice about him-- Llewellyn Watts is not typical. While he sometimes has a flat affect, it’s not quite the perfect, polite blank that you see on Murdoch, it’s more of a thoughtful scowl that he wears when he’s not doing something else with his face, and which doesn’t necessarily reflect his thoughts or emotions-- in fact, occasionally runs counter to them, causing other characters pause. 

    Of course, most of the time his problem isn’t a flat affect, but the opposite-- his face is remarkably mobile, his expressions exaggerated-- eyebrows in particular. It’s just that his expressions seem to be chiefly for his own benefit rather than for communicating his thoughts and feelings to others, and they don’t match what a typical person’s face might be doing under the same circumstances. The exception to this is what I’d taken to calling in my notes his Normal Man Face-- a pained smile that he wears when he needs to convince other men that he is Normal. It comes out both when he becomes aware that he needs to appear more neurotypical than he has been seeming, and when he needs to look straight. 

    The other thing that’s fairly noticeable straight off the bat is Watts’ speech pattern-- while he sometimes speaks in short, clipped, to the point sentences, and sometimes goes off on longer and more flowery philosophical tangents, the constant is the rhythm of it. His speech is broken up by frequent pauses-- sometimes there’s a sharp intake of breath, frequently there’s a toneless ‘mm’ which is not communicative, but most often there’s just a pause, without hesitation noise and without a non-verbal gesture to communicate that he’s still going. Lucky for him, he lives in a scripted television series, and so no one takes his frequent pauses for permission to interrupt-- unless, of course, there’s a good reason for it. For a lot of people on the spectrum, we speak more slowly than neurotypicals, often with pauses, to process the flow of the conversation at a different speed or to search for the right word to communicate as precisely as possible (and precision in verbal communication gets to be more and more important the less one is able to rely on non-verbal communication)-- and for a lot of us, we find ourselves getting talked over a lot by people who process verbal communication at a higher speed. So seeing these frequent pauses is one of the particular things that feels true and relatable to me.

    There’s a lot that I find hard to put words to-- I do admit a lot of my notes read ‘FACE’ or ‘POSTURE’ or ‘LOOK AT HIM’, so I’ll try to pick out the things I can describe with more than a vague ‘same’. A lot of his physicality is just familiar, to me as an Autistic person. It’s the way his face goes between immobile to hypermobile regardless of whether he’s turned towards someone, the way he leans on the nearest surface or object when he enters a space, in a way that’s curiously uncasual. There are a lot of hand gestures and gesticulations which range from floaty to tensely emphatic-- not the stereotypical hand-flapping-as-stim, but a lot like the way many autistic adults move their hands while talking, when they’ve learned one way or another what the world will allow. As for posture, whenever he and Murdoch are on a case together, whether they’re on foot or bicycle, you can immediately tell in a long shot who’s who even when silhouetted, just by the distinct posture of each-- Watts would be taller than Murdoch if he stood up straight, but he does not, and that carries over to their posture while bicycling, and the different pattern of tension, angle the head is held at, etc. Also, just… in s11e2, when Watts and George come into Brackenreid’s office drunk, you can tell because his head and neck are a little looser and so is his speech, but he holds himself at the exact same angle drunk or sober. He’s just permanently at a tilt and in need of a surface to prop himself up against (or to push against, but more on that later).

    The word ‘jammed’ is an apt one, for how Watts fits himself into the world. He jams himself into spaces (more on that under sensory regulation), he jams his hands into his pockets, he jams himself into as little space as his body can take up, his shoulders frequently up around his ears. He doesn’t quite fit the world comfortably and it comes across in the way he holds himself-- there’s an ever-present tension (and here, from a Watsonian perspective, it’s impossible to separate out what comes from being Autistic in an increasingly sensory-hostile world, and what comes from being gay in a homophobic world, but the tension is there), there’s posture that moves from slouch to lean to hunch, there’s two positions he routinely holds his head in, his chin either thrust forward at an odd angle, or tucked down against his chest. There are little ways he moves that I recognize, even when the tics aren’t the ones I share, as coming from a place I know. 

    Speaking of the hands-in-pockets, while he often has one hand in pocket while standing around, it’s something that’s mostly seen while he’s walking-- almost every time he’s on the move, in fact. If he isn’t holding something in his hand, he has both hands shoved deep into his pockets, which is one of the things a lot of Autistic adults learn to do to avoid standing out if their natural gait doesn’t involve swinging their arms as they walk-- and as we see in s12e8 and s13e18, even when he doesn’t have his hands in his pockets, he does not swing his arms when he walks. His shoulders sometimes move, but his arms remain straight at his sides.

    Watts does a fair amount of fidgeting with objects-- among his favorite foci for fidgeting seems to be any plant, he is a menace to flora everywhere, but he will grab and mess with anything, regardless of whether or not he’s supposed to, and if there’s not an object to fidget with, in several episodes he falls back on picking at his nails-- whether this is related to a mild dermatillomania, a particular standard for neatness that he occasionally discovers himself not meeting which he then prioritizes over paying full attention to a police interview, or the pure need to pick at something and having nothing else at hand to play with, I couldn’t say, but there’s not an explanation that’s inherently un-Autistic. Also a lot of moments when there’s not time or opportunity to fidget with something, he just touches or pats things. 

    Under the general umbrella of atypical moments of physicality, there’s the little turnaround he frequently does before changing directions or setting off walking-- sometimes spinning in a full circle, other times turning briefly one way and then reversing, which is just an atypical way of navigating the world. There’s the way he walks while leaning forward at a nearly Groucho Marx angle, and the way he’s almost always in motion of some kind-- when he’s standing still and not fidgeting, there’s often a nervous energy or a lot of physical tension. He’s definitely a kinetic thinker, and he doesn’t like being stuck at a desk, or stuck indoors in general. He would much rather be doing the bulk of his work from outdoors and while on the move. As for his posture when he is still, I’d say my neck and shoulders hurt looking at him, but it’s probably more accurate to say my neck and shoulders hurt because of my own terrible posture. He doesn’t straighten up often, and he rarely looks comfortable doing so, which is a mood and a half-- there’s a combination of suffering a lifetime of bullying, a constant flood of more sensory information than the average person is receiving, and a lizard brain that way over-interprets how much danger you’re in, which it’s again easy for me as an Autistic viewer to read into his seeming desire to take up less physical space in the world, the fact that he seems more comfortable when he is taking up less space. 

    Eye contact is another big one-- Watts frequently cuts eye contact short or avoids it altogether. He spends a lot of time next to rather than facing the person he’s talking to, looking at others only in sidelong glances, or keeping his gaze down when in a group and only lifting it to people briefly. He watches the room out of the periphery of his vision more often than not-- while in s10e4, he does twist around in his chair to keep his eyes on villain-of-the-week Shanley, in a particularly unsubtle bit of surveillance, in situations where he wants to keep an eye on a potential threat he is far more likely to hold uncharacteristically still while facing away from the threat at up to a ninety degree angle, focus clearly on said potential threat even while he’s not pointed at it. Similarly, if he’s listening in on a conversation he’s not contributing to and it’s important information rather than people he likes socializing, he often faces completely away but remains tense, still, and focused. There’s also the meerkat-ing-- he frequently pops up from a hunched position in order to track something interesting, similar to the Shanley example in s10e4. He may crane his neck or his entire body to follow, or he may rely on peripheral vision-- the difference is not a matter of whether or not he’s trying to be subtle, he’s not subtle. The difference seems based more on whether he perceives the thing he’s focused on to be in any way a direct threat, in which case he avoids even the possibility of direct eye contact.

    I honestly don’t know if this belongs under social or mannerisms or sensory regulation or what, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there is no neurotypical explanation for the end of s11e1 and the thing he does with his hand after shaking hands with Murdoch. It’s not a distressed shaking-out, it’s maybe a sensory shaking-out, it’s maybe just an inability to handle a friendly handshake? But I’m putting it here because I do not know what to call it.

    Another one for the ‘Gay or Autistic’ file is the inability to sit properly in a chair-- he usually comes closest in the chairs in the interview room, though even then he either slouches or leans across the table when he is sitting, and of course any chair he has not been invited to sit in, and also sits mostly normally when in a restaurant or pub (though again in pubs he tends to either slouch back or stretch across the table/lean on the bar, and in the hotel restaurant in s10e4 he’s continuously twisting around in his chair). Outside of that, he normally forgoes a chair entirely if he can perch on a desk or table, or simply stand and lean on something. In s11e8, he at one point kneels backwards on a chair. (he does sit normally enough-- which is to say with the normal-for-him amount of slouching and leaning forward-- in what seems to be his own chair at his own desk in s13e18, but he also seems to be overcoming his aversion to sitting at his desk specifically on occasions when he’s being met with for work)

    Also, while not a mannerism so much as a habit, it’s worth noting that he has never once used a hat rack or wall hook. Places his hat has been instead of where a hat belongs? On desks and tables, on top of cabinets, on the banister in the city morgue, on a medical dummy, and on a covered corpse. He’s also set his gloves on top of a bust in s13e17 when investigating the stolen painting (his hat is otherwise occupied).

    There’s one other thing he does, which while not an ‘Autistic thing’, is a persistent habit and therefore worth noting-- when he expects someone to follow him, he doesn’t turn back to see whether or not they are, but every time he leaves someone who he does not expect to follow him, he stops and looks back over his shoulder at whoever he’s leaving, whether it’s a roomful of people or just one. Often with no verbal goodbye at any point.

    I haven’t normally been doing full rundowns of the different things I point out, but… here is a complete list of every time he has taken a plant or part of a plant (this is plants only, so the feather in s11e6 and the piece of wood chipping off the shed in s13e9 do not count, but this is also only when he’s taking a plant for the sheer enjoyment of having part of a plant to mess with, so using a branch as a tool in s12e8 also does not count):

    -s10e4: Grabs a leaf off a tree in passing when heading through the park with George while on the case.

    -s11e2: Yoinks a leaf off of one of the flowers on the flower-seller’s cart.

    -s11e7: Pulls a flower out of a woman’s basket in passing

    -s12e12: Picks up a leaf at a crime scene, and picks up another leaf later on which he tears apart.  

    -s12e17: Has a stick to swing a little and fidget with

    -s13e5: Tears part of a flower off, from the homophobic lady’s flower basket.

EMOTIONAL AND SENSORY REGULATION

    Okay, first of all, with regards to emotional regulation, I’m just going to say it-- this show piles a LOT of trauma onto Watts. I mean there’s no character who hasn’t been hit with a certain amount of trauma after thirteen years, and some characters-- like Brackenreid-- take time to process that trauma and might take a several-episode arc to deal with something, while others-- like George-- process and let go of most things almost immediately. But in only thirty-six episodes, Watts has had a LOT of traumatic and otherwise emotionally taxing storylines, he does not process and move past trauma the way George does, and he has never been given the opportunity to deal with his most personal traumas on-screen. In s12e17-18 he gets to have some time to process his feelings over the two-parter, and most importantly gets about two minutes of talk therapy, which he seems the ideal candidate for given how he takes to just that much, but for all of his most personal traumas, he’s just expected to be fine the next time we see him, and it’s not because we’re given any indication that he’s moving past trauma in a healthy way off-screen-- what we know about him runs counter to that idea. He holds onto things for a long time and he carries serious damage from the past that affects his present. 

    The series of losses he’s suffered throughout his life, both in his childhood and during the time we know him, leave their mark in the form of serious abandonment issues-- and in s10e12-15 in particular, heavily impaired judgment regarding missing women in general and his sister in particular. The abandonment issues lead to his actions in s11e8, during his attempt at a heterosexual romance, when he withholds Fiona’s bicycle in hopes of getting to keep her in his life. In his own assessment of his feelings, he doesn’t think he won’t get over her quickly in a romantic sense-- indeed, he spends most of the time they’re together avoiding romantic contact, sometimes substituting in more potentially-platonic physical contact when she makes a move, sometimes physically leaning away from her. Despite the fact that he isn’t interested in her the way that she makes it clear she’s interested in him, the idea of being left by someone else is a difficult thing to grapple with. It’s the very next episode where George turns to Watts with the question of whether or not he wants to go to Paris with Nina-- Watts’ immediate response is an anxious ‘forever?’, nevermind the fact that they’re currently working to avert Watts’ potential murder, death comes for us all and can’t be predicted, and he’s more concerned with whether he’s losing another close friend. And loss and abandonment are hard enough for a neurotypical brain, but that disruption to routine, and to a previously-held expectation of being able to see the same people in the same places at the same times, not to mention the difficulty of processing these things when you have a lot of emotion but no power to process it… it’s hard.

    And that’s the thing-- with many Autistic people, the emotions aren’t just there, they’re incredibly strong, and they’re incredibly difficult to regulate, and we don’t necessarily have the language with which to talk about them. Watts has that incredible depth of empathy, but no understanding of his emotions. In his earlier seasons in particular, he denies them-- likely he has had them denied by others, because they don’t display typically. It’s a common Autistic experience to be told that you don’t feel just because others don’t understand what you’re feeling, and it’s sadly common to internalize that. With the importance he places on objective truth, when we meet him he considers emotions an unnecessary complication-- one he would like to opt out of, when in times like those in s10e15, there’s no denying that he is struggling with difficult emotions. He lost his parents and was abandoned by his sister at age twelve-- at around-about the onset of puberty and a time when emotions are even more riotous than usual, he was thrown into a brand new living situation, with no one who understood how to help him learn emotional regulation. That he was adopted into a family with visibly disabled children may have meant a certain level of understanding, but not a full understanding of his own different needs.

    While he engages in self-soothing stimming when under some degree of stress, and sometimes gets snappish when pushed, it’s when he’s dealing with the most stress and trauma-- either fresh or reopened-- that he stops his usual self-soothing stims, drops many of his familiar tics, and develops a flat affect that is very different from his usual. When dealing with family-related woes in particular, he moves into a semi-shutdown. He doesn’t fidget, he drops his hypervigilance, and he goes very blank, outside of the quiet crying he does during s12e7. 

    His reaction to learning he himself has been marked for death in s11e9 mostly consists of a very non-neurotypical face journey, a nervous laugh, and frustration about being asked to remain indoors not doing a job-- having a job to do seems to be a big part of how he does regulate himself, whether or not it’s always a healthy way of doing so, and when he can’t work, he has difficulty with the agitation of being still, being in the office. His reaction to death in others varies-- bodies in the morgue or at a crime scene he comes to after the fact-- provided the victim is an adult-- he has no reaction to, and he discusses how he handles not thinking of them as people. Whenever he’s had to witness a death, however, he seems to be deeply affected and also seems to be unable to share his emotions with others, either to share comfort or just to have a release valve. Because his face remains impassive, he is not offered comfort by those who have the emotional language to reach out to others, as well. People know to reach out to him when he is suffering a personal loss, but when he is merely suffering because he is exposed to suffering? It’s something he weathers inwardly.

    What he does eventually do for self-regulation, at least from s12 onward, is take up running. He mentions that it clears the head, and when it comes to anxiety, he’s not wrong-- anxiety is the brain telling you you’re in danger, and when the body doesn’t do anything about it, all the brain can do is keep sending out danger signals. Running means that the brain is hearing back from the body that yes, we’re moving away from the danger now, you can stop sending signals. It’s not something that only helps Autistic people, but it is something that helps a lot of Autistic people.

    Regarding sensory regulation I’m going to start with PROPRIOCEPTION! One of the biggies of sensory regulation, Watts spends a lot of time seeking proprioceptive feedback. While he spends a lot of time leaning on things in general, in particular he spends a lot of time with his left shoulder pressed hard into a wall, post, or other available surface. Some of his forward leaning also seems to be proprioceptive-- it’s not a relaxed lean, but a hard press. 

    Categorizing under stims because this comes very close to one of my own, but there’s a frequent thing he does where he puffs his mouth up with air and then there’s usually a very hard-blown horse-y sigh that follows-- sometimes a mid-sentence pause, sometimes freestanding-- but there are times that he just kind of holds a mouthful of air for a minute. Not holding his breath, but holding a pocket of air between teeth and lips while continuing to breathe normally through his nose.

    The main stim, though, is the one that is by and large a self-soothing stim (to go back to emotional regulation), the thing he does most often when under stress, the face-scratching. Most frequently, it’s the right hand to the left side of the jaw or the chin, sometimes up towards the cheek but with that same reaching across. Other times it’s over one side or the other of the brow. There’s also a back-of-the-head scratch which sometimes also seems to fill the same self-soothing role. As with just the plant-nabbing bits, I’ve got a count on self-soothing stimming, but I won’t be throwing in a count of all non-self-soothing stims.

    Also, in s13e17, I’m adding in that he seems to really enjoy being kind of physically flung? Like, he’s on his feet the entire time, it’s just a proprioceptive-and-vestibular-feedback friendly bit of handling, from a person he trusts. It’s not really on the level of roughhousing, I wouldn’t say, but like, it’s definitely contact that would fill both the proprioceptive and vestibular sensory-seeking niche. Can’t chalk all looseness and happiness up to sensory feedback because this is during a time when he’s otherwise relaxed and happy, but it doesn’t hurt so I’m throwing it in here.

    And, let us not overlook Watts’ relationship with food, and it is a Relationship. Food is something he takes immense pleasure and-- it is not unreasonable to suppose-- also comfort in. When he eats, he’s very much in the moment of enjoyment, and often more than usually uncaring of social convention-- which is saying something. For a man who lives in a world where etiquette is often strictly regimented, he cares about none of it. Whether or not he’s especially sensory-seeking when it comes to flavor, he does have some preferences-- and a marked preference for meals that can be eaten by hand rather than with utensil, not surprisingly, and in particular a fondness for pretzels and for hot dogs. The main sensory component here seems to just be having his mouth full, and often. He takes large bites, and he keeps on taking them-- and he doesn’t often pass up an opportunity to eat; in s11e2, he picks at the food from the wedding reception that serves as their crime scene, and in s11e7 he eats an apple off the ground while investigating the accident-- Actually, it might be quicker to say that in s13e8, he doesn’t eat the food from the green room (and I spent the entire episode waiting for him to, despite the fact he brought his own snacks). He’s only sorry in s11e13 not to be able to eat the food he knows has been poisoned. Food is also, notably, one of the major ways he expresses care/esteem for others, generally by trying to share something he enjoys with someone he enjoys being around-- and one of the ways he accepts the notion that he himself is cared for (as in s10e15 when Jackson remembers his favorite food while he’s dealing with his feelings about his sister, or s13e9, when we see his boyfriend send him off with a wrapped lunch).

    As far as sensory avoidance goes I only have a few points, in s10e4, he moves a vase out of the center of the table during his dinner with Murdoch-- since it in no way impedes his view of his dining partner, it seems to simply be a way of reducing the visual noise in a visually busy environment. In several episodes, he startles easily at loud noises-- the accident in s11e7 as well as the one in s13e16, and the gunshot in s12e11 are all particular examples. It never stops him from diving in and doing his job quickly, but he is visibly startled each time. More painfully, the breaking bottle in s13e18 carries the double whammy of being both a very sharp loud noise but also a personal attack. He also mentions preferring Brackenreid’s office, in s10e11, because it has a separate entrance that doesn’t necessitate moving through the bullpen-- could be a sensory avoidance issue, but it could also just be a people avoidance issue, given that this is his second time at Station House Four and he has yet to connect with many people and to develop. In s13e17, he uses his hat to block out the room specifically in order to allow himself to think.

   As for where there’s not sensory avoidance? Pain-- he definitely has a diminished response to pain, judging by how little he reacts to his gunshot wound being treated in s12e7.

    Okay, a little more raw data now-- first, the Self-Soothing Stim count, not counting the same physical stim if I cannot trace it to a cause for self-soothing:

    -s10e15: the first time the reach-across jaw scratch really seems to be self soothing is when he’s leaving his sister. Immediately after he turns away from her to really leave, he goes into the jaw scratch. It comes back again after he has to discuss his sister/feelings with Murdoch and Julia, as they transition from talking about his personal business to talking business. 

    -s11e1: after being startled by Julia, I’d consider the face-scratching to be a self-soothe-- even though the situation was resolved happily rather than badly, it doesn’t change the stress that was there. 

    -s11e7: I’m just going to ASSUME all face-scratching incidences in this episode are self-soothing because he spends the ENTIRE episode so quietly upset about Dilbert. It happens early on, and then again at the end as he’s leaving.

    -s11e8: Potentially a self-soothe as he’s contemplating his own loneliness. 

    -s11e9: Potentially a self-soothe when dealing with the room full of people slated for death-- this is before he learns he’s one of them, but he frequently self-soothes in reaction to the distress of others, which he picks up on but cannot properly process. 

    -s11e15: Unclear if the cheek scratch here is a self-soothe because the moment itself isn’t the most stressful, but he IS going through a HELL of a week personally. Less traumatic but still very emotionally heavy for him, a lot of parents feelings. 

    -s12e4: Scratches at jaw when the subject of deportation comes up-- given the fact that he’s relatively comfortable among immigrants and his views on the concept of borders, a likely self-soothe.

    -s12e11: IMMEDIATE self-soothe stim on seeing the cigarette burns on the lawyer’s arm, left by childhood abuse.

    -s12e12: Scratches at face when arriving at crime scene to see the victim is a child. Another face-scratch while discussing a child being beaten. 

    -s12e17: Potentially a self-soothe-- or a self-psyching-up-- when he goes to ask Violet for something outside his jurisdiction. Also potentially a self-soothe when he scratches at his face while discussing the case. It’s not personal in the usual sense, but he takes it very personally that a witness from an old case should be dead under mysterious circumstances. 

    -s13e5: The scratch to the back of the head isn’t normally the self-soothe, but this is during the indecency discussion. The self-soothing face scratch comes out in full force when he has to press a cute boy for information himself-- Brackenreid may want to believe Jack is straight, Watts does not have that problem. He also rubs at his face when Detective Scott is charged, though it’s not the usual scratching stim-- it is definitely a moment when he really needs to calm himself down fast before he says or does something intemperate. Again he scratches at his face while questioning Jack. Another back-of-head scratch when he goes to ask Jack about the stamps, down in the cells. Another face scratch when he’s told he has to make a real arrest before he can release the two innocent men-- one whom he obviously sees a lot of himself in, and one he’s developing a romantic attraction to. Face scratch when Bedard discusses the murder he’d committed may also be a self-soothe under the circumstances. 

    -s13e8: May or may not be a self-soothe after a confrontation, though with the face scratch at the end, I lean towards ‘just a stim’-- it is still possible that it’s a reaction to built up stress.

    -s13e13: Chin scratch after finding the body in Murdoch’s house-- normally he’s not bothered by adult corpses he didn’t know or witness the deaths of, but this is Murdoch’s house, and he had stated his opinion that it was too beautiful a day for a dead body. May or may not be self-soothing when discussing case with Murdoch, given that this is a very stressful situation for Murdoch and Watts tends to absorb others’ stress. Definitely seems to be self-soothing, if not the most usual form, when he’s got to go over the evidence against Murdoch. 

    -s13e16: Scratch to the back of the head when Murdoch puts him on the spot. 

    -s13e17: One of the BIGGEST examples when Edwards asks if Jack is a friend of his, as his hand crosses over to scratch at the left side of his face he completely covers his mouth as well. Another self-soothing moment when Aldous Germaine is indiscreet in the interview room. 

    -s13e18: Another back-of-head scratch when told to be quiet. Another face scratch while out with Jack-- could be just a regular stim, given that he is expecting to have a good time, but he is also out in public with his boyfriend and no matter how careful he thinks he’s being, there is an element of risk. Definitely a self-soothe when he asks if Edwards doesn’t like wine. 

    And just for fun, the pretzel count:

        -s10e12: the first appearance of the pretzel. He takes it onto the end of an awkwardly extended pencil for some reason? We learn he discovered them on a trip to New York, which is the first mention of his love of travel (more in a moment), and we also learn that his idea of a friendly overture is to shove the thing he’s eating into his new (best!) friend’s face (Jackson’s not feeling it).

        -s10e15: comfort food time, after he first learns his sister just up and abandoned him, and then lied to him about why she left, and that she never intended to find him again. And again at the end of the episode, this time given to him by Jackson, who remembers he’s got a clear fondness.

        -s13e13: he just has one in his pocket! When he wants to lend his handkerchief to a grieving widow, he just TEARS into the pretzel he’d had wrapped in said handkerchief. Holds it really awkwardly, wrist kind of loose and grip at an odd angle, and just takes an unnecessarily large bite considering the circumstances. 

        -s13e16: Not only does he have a pretzel, he buys a pretzel for the boy who he’s helped to find his pig-- and he feeds little torn off bits to said pig!

SPECIAL AREAS OF INTEREST

    I cannot overemphasize the importance of special interests, honestly. Like… I’ll also go into less intense interests here, but a real serious special interest is the feeling of something being a part of you. Sharing that with other people is important. Some people will jump at any opportunity to infodump where their special interest is concerned, for others, even if the urge to do so is strong, it’s a show of trust to share anything about a special interest because trying to share a special interest has gone badly in the past.

    For Watts, he’s a big sharer. This comes up for the first time in s11e2, when we learn that Watts is an oenophile-- and boy do we learn it. He’s enraptured when they go into the victim’s wine cellar, and he’s thrilled to be able to lecture Murdoch about his special interest-- a beast which is unleashed when Murdoch asserts that all wine is basically the same. Watts getting to teach Murdoch how to taste wine is as loose and happy as we see him to this point. He also gets to show off his expertise-- eventually-- when they give up on trying to use the spectroscope to analyze the wine and let him bring in his sommelier. 

    The interest in wine is something that comes back-- in s13e5, he’s quick to jump on a rare bottle of wine as a potential clue, and one of the things that helps him shake off the stress of dealing with the relentless casual homophobia he’s been dealing with all day is going to the wine shop to follow up on his lead-- and to surround himself with something he loves (and the fact that the buyer of the wine is Detective Scott, who serves as something of a narrative foil, further cements the two of them as being alike). It comes back again in s13e18 when gifting bottles of wine is how he expresses himself-- both in attempting to cement a positive relationship with Edwards, who he’s spent two episodes really trying to be friendly with, and in expressing his gratitude to Brackenreid. And again, it’s that importance he has placed on the sharing of a special interest.

    Another big interest is travel, which comes up frequently. Perhaps most notably, it comes up in s11e8-- first, when he’s excited to discuss John Muir and his recent writing on the Sierras with George and Nina, and later when he meets Fiona, who shares his interest in world travel. Having seen George and Nina in love, and feeling his own loneliness keenly, he takes to her right away, but it’s a shared special interest that drives the relationship on his end, rather than romance. He’s happiest in her company when he’s listening to her talk about all the places she’s been. Travel comes up in smaller ways, in throwaway lines about places he’s been, or in his coming back after several episodes’ absence with a line about his having been traveling-- and in the way he talks about travel being a broadening experience, if someone else’s travels come up-- but this is the episode that drives home how much it means to him as an interest. Not just something he likes doing, but something he gets a lot of enjoyment out of reading about or listening to others talk about.

    Philosophy seems to be a deep interest-- something that permeates everything for him. Even when he’s not bringing up specific philosophers, as he does in his very first episode (s10e4, where he also talks about the self as something of a ship of Theseus problem), or quoting from something he’s read, it touches how he talks about everything, how he views the world, how his views evolve, to the way that he questions everything, and how he determines value in life. Again, this is something self-guided rather than the product of his education, and he comes across as very driven towards self-improvement and self-education. In s11e12 and s11e15 we learn that this interest extends to comparative religion.

    It’s in s11e7 that we get our first look at Watts the polyglot, speaking of self-education and special interests-- we learn he speaks German, but that his pronunciation is poor (again a potential sign of being self-taught and having only read a certain amount in books). In s11e16, we learn he’s familiar enough with Russian and Cyrillic to help with translation efforts, and s12e4 that he’s working on learning Greek, though he only has certain words and phrases-- he’s eager to know if George is fascinated only in Hellenic languages, or the entire Indo-European language group. In s12e12, we add French to the list. 

    Other passions seem to include theatre (in s11e8 he’s eager to jump into a conversation with a point about Broadway, and he certainly has opinions in s13e8, both about the play itself which is abysmal on all counts, and the nature of the role of the critic) and a perhaps less intense or pervasive interest in modern architecture (in s12e1, he’s very excited about Frank Lloyd Wright, but architecture is not a subject he brings up with any frequency). 

    Notably, though, Watts isn’t only interested in his own special interests-- he’s sometimes deeply interested in the special interests of others. In s11e12, his own interest in religion feeds off of Murdoch’s passion for his faith, and he questions him exhaustively about belief and about miracles-- and while he’s not as interested in the STEM fields as he is in the arts and humanities, he’s shown to be keener on the sciences when he’s feeding off of Murdoch’s own interest. In s11e6, he is eager to engage with both George and Nina on the subject of chess, something he’s certainly passable at but not passionate about the way either of them is, except for when he can be excited for them. In s13e5, while not being particularly interested in stamps the way George and the collectors are, he’s a more avid listener when he’s listening to someone whose level of interest/engagement he finds relatable. 

OTHER

    Just a place where I’m dumping everything I could not comfortably fit into the other categories. Firstly, to point out that George and Julia both compare Watts to Murdoch-- George tells Murdoch that rather than considering him foolish just because of his scattered appearance, he finds the experience of working with Watts to be somehow very like following Murdoch. Julia more specifically points to their difficulty in dealing with their emotions. 

    Julia’s assessment of Watts in s12e7 is that she does not believe he’s capable of lying-- this is something that’s frequently said about Autistic people, and while it’s true that Watts holds the objective Truth to be above nearly all else (along with Justice), he is capable of lying. He’s not great at it, when it’s not a matter of life and death, but of course at this point she has no way of knowing that the ability to lie is, for him, a matter of life and death. In s11e1, he’s capable of some creative truth-telling-- he’s more comfortable with twisting things than outright lying, and if he’s going to sell something untrue, he generally needs a well-prepared fiction to act out. Something he’s good at in s12e7, because he believes it to be a matter of protecting his brother, but which he’s not so good at in s13e13 (though he’s not caught out despite his very amateurish acting). Despite his ability to lie, he often volunteers truths that would be inconvenient to him to have known-- in s13e5, he’s keeping one hell of a secret throughout, but he still tells Brackenreid that he released Jack from his cell and left him alone for an hour, even though he could have easily said yes, when he spoke with him alone, he was willing to give him more information which he hadn’t been asked for in the interview room. This is in no doubt partly down to his own discomfort with unnecessary lies, and down in large part to his desire to point out to Brackenreid that Jack Walker is as honest and trustworthy as Brackenreid ever believed him to be before knowing he was also gay. Again, in s13e9, he volunteers the information to George, that he does not live in the building where he was just seen exiting a room in the morning. A lie would have been safer in the moment, but wouldn’t have felt right-- and would have come back to bite him in the end.

    We also have a few theory of mind moments-- in s10e4, we get the first instance of Watts assuming that if he knows something, then everyone else either knows it, or is an idiot. In s11e13, he comes into Brackenreid’s office and starts in the middle of the information he has for him, bringing up a piece of evidence that Brackenreid was not privy to as if he would naturally already know this, and in s13e17 he also seems to expect Murdoch to be able to essentially read his mind, and know what he’s talking about even if he leaves out some of the telling. 

    A minor thing, but in s10e4 we do also discover that Watts does not voluntarily get out of bed before nine in the morning. Given that this man is the opposite of lazy, it points to the kind of sleep schedule issue that’s common to people on the Autism spectrum, whether it’s insomnia or a delayed sleep phase. It was one of the things that jumped out at me, despite being a single throwaway line. Another minor thing, he goes from not getting Murdoch’s blackboard to finding it invaluable -- but he doesn’t write on it, he just uses the blank space as a point of reference while visualizing (and when he sees Edwards staring at the rectangle of empty space where a painting used to be, he cheerfully asks him if he’s visualizing). When he does actually write on the board, he also writes on the frame when he takes up too much space without planning out what he’ll need.

    Another thing I just need to bring up is his wardrobe and grooming-- first, the clothes. Even his most loose-fitting suit is clearly cut to conform to the shape of a human body more than the popular sack suit of the time. The sack suit is what Murdoch wears, and is in fact what most men of Watts’ class and status wear. He’s got the dressing habits of a dandy-- not only the close fit of his suits in a time when the mainstream fashion was for loose and shapeless menswear, but the fact that he only wears a stand collar (at least prior to his Frankie Drake appearance, though he’s still a very flashy dresser in the 20s), that he favors flashier ties if not flashier fabrics (two of his suits are plaid, as is one overcoat). He also never wears his jackets closed, for what that’s worth. How much is a sensory need for something closer fitting, or the absence of something loose-fitting, I don’t know-- it could also simply be personal style, and a lack of any consideration for what convention dictates. The other men who dress more in line with the way he does tend to be upper class (and occasionally sexually ambiguous if not gay), but we can definitively say it’s not about class aspiration, given his socialist leanings. Given his difficulty with the social communication side of things in s13e5, if his sexuality has any bearing on how he dresses, it’s not as a method of signalling to other men-- but it may be an awareness of what’s attractive, even if it’s only for his own satisfaction. But dressing too well alone wouldn’t have me jumping to take notes on personal appearance-- it’s the juxtaposition. Watts is never cleanly-shaven, but it’s not until the Frankie Drake cold case that he has any attempt at purposeful facial hair, he’s just permanently stubbly at best, and more often downright scruffy. His hair is rarely especially kempt, though it’s certainly at a length and style where it never looks what I’d call sloppy. It’s the shoes, though-- he only owns one pair of shoes. They goes with the brown and green plaid suits, but they don’t go with the grey and black suits. This would be a consideration to any other gentleman who put that kind of care into a suit, it’s not a consideration to him. He buys and wears the things that he likes, and while he takes pains to match things like ties and waistcoats to his suit in aesthetically pleasing ways, the shoes are what they are whether or not they go and whether or not people notice. Also, he wipes hot wax on his jacket at one point, even though he always has a handkerchief on his person, which goes to show how much he cares about appearance and status, no matter how much he does care about what clothes he wears. And he does not see to wear sleeve garters to ensure the proper break between shirt cuff and jacket sleeve, as his shirtsleeves often seem too long. Again, possibly a sensory issue, possibly just something he doesn’t consider necessary merely because convention dictates.

    It’s during the storyline with Watts’ sister Clarissa that we see the most of the relatable Gifted and Talented kid not good enough feeling-- when she lies to him about a man who had threatened her in the past, he’s immediately thrown into a spiral of guilt over having not been aware of it at the time. At the time, of course, he was twelve years old, and there was in actuality nothing for him to be aware of, but perceiving things is his bread and butter, it’s the skill on which he’s built his career and his life, and to have been unable to perceive a danger to his sister when she was all he had in the world is a blow that shakes him. In s11e9 again, we have an upset over being perceived as being not capable enough, which relates to the feeling of having shown promise only to fall short ‘when it matters’, and also to how he’s perceived as far as age and maturity are concerned (more in a minute on that, too). More than the feeling of not being good enough, though, with Clarissa we see his feelings about being a burden, and it’s telling.

    Burden is, a lot of Autistic people will tell you, a loaded word. He understands that the care of a younger sibling is not a job that any fifteen year old should be forced to shoulder, but that doesn’t change the heartbreak and the betrayal at being called an unwanted burden-- unwanted then, and unwanted now. A burden then, and… maybe a burden forever, regardless of how hard he works and how much he achieves and how far he comes, because he is always so immediately ready to blame himself for everything. The mental gymnastics he goes through in order to take the blame for things he could not have known about are going for the gold here. Most notably in s12e18, when he and Julia are both eager to take the blame for John’s condition-- but while she is able to turn to healthy coping mechanisms and to work through that guilt, even if it takes time and in this instance being able to fix something which had gone wrong earlier, coping skills are once again not a thing Watts has ever picked up, prior to their chat.

    Related to burden, and related to his perception of how people view him and whether he is seen as able is the subject of what is ‘age appropriate’. Much as I dislike the comparison of Autistic adults to children, I don’t have a better set of words for a lot of what I want to talk about here. It’s the moments of emphatic physicality which are more coltish than adult-clumsy, as if it’s impossible to grow into one’s body the way everyone else does. It’s the way that beneath the older and more worldly mask he puts on professionally so that he’ll be treated like an adult despite the young age at which he was promoted, he finds it easy to put himself into a child’s mindset-- not because he’s great with kids across the board, but because he has not-- cannot-- forget what it is to be a child who is afraid. And because so often, interacting with a world where everyone knows rules you don’t feels like being a child dressed up as an adult, and when people see the adult you are, it feels like you’re fooling them. In s13e13, he raises his hand before asking Murdoch a question. He has a specific expression which is not quite an ‘adult’ smugness so much as it is a need for validation and praise when he knows he’s done something right (no one ever seems to notice the ‘praise me!’ face, and if they do they no doubt do read smugness into it, for no one ever praises him, and if he needs validation he has to ask if he’s done the right thing). There’s a certain boyishness that comes out both in his facial expression and in his posture, when he’s confronted with loving discipline, as well-- in s11e19, when he’s forced to stay inside because his life is in danger, he’s frustrated by it, and there’s something very youthful in the way he hangs his head and how he holds his cup in his lap. It’s a quality that comes back, sans frustration, when Jack stops him from leaving without taking lunch with him in s13e9-- just something that reads very boyishly, on a man of thirty, in the way he draws himself up and ducks his head, and the smile at having someone who cares about him enough to stop him and be very slightly and gently stern with him about making sure he eats (which is, again, an expression of love he can really understand). 

    I mentioned hypervigilance early on-- how he tracks threats, and I just want to bring up s11e1 and how he reacts to having Julia come up behind him. There’s something very ungainly about it, and half-panicked, and definitely not the reaction you might expect from… well, a grown man who happens to be a police detective. Also worth noting just how easily he rolls with seeing her dressed as a man, that part doesn’t throw him in the slightest-- he understands why she might wear a disguise, given the circumstances, this is a good one. It’s just the threat response and the way he shies away from potential violence so often as if he’s not fully aware that he’s… tall, he’s physically fit, he’s in a position to be able to defend himself against some, if not all, of the people he feels cowed by.

    One thought about Watts’ upbringing-- well, two; firstly, did his sister abandon him without thinking about his feelings, or did she abandon him believing that he wouldn’t have feelings? But back to the main thought-- he tells her that he was taken care of, and he clearly retains a great deal of love for the adoptive brothers he was raised with, but he displays so much cynicism in s12e11 when discussing the situation of the home children, to the point where a man who discusses the benefits of socialism and would jump off a cliff if any of his friends asked him to is standing there denying the human capacity for altruism. Not like he was locked in an attic or anything, hard to imagine that he was treated especially badly, but given everything about him and how he measures his self-worth in such large part in relation to others, it’s easy to imagine that there were ways in which he was made to feel he needed to earn his keep from an early age. Certainly whether or not anyone intended for him to feel that way, he took on responsibility for protecting his new brothers.

    And about his brothers-- really, about his concept of himself as someone who is disabled-- when he talks about Danny and Hubert, he emphasizes their full humanity and individuality, he demands that they be respected as men. He rejects the notion that Hubert would not stand trial on grounds of mental incompetence. Despite the fact that they are very different from him in how they process things, these weren’t just boys he lived with for a few years between being orphaned and being self-sufficient, these were people he connected to. 

    He knows that the world doesn’t view him as normal, and he knows that his experience isn’t everyone else’s-- he sees the things other people don’t struggle with, he’s working overtime to keep up, he is at least aware some of the time of being laughed at and being othered. He’s accustomed to loneliness when we meet him and he’s resigned to being disliked even when he makes social overtures. He’s sometimes surprised to find that people value him not for what he can do for them but simply because he’s a friend. And in that, he’s one of the most honest portrayals of Autism I’ve seen.

QUOTES

    Just… the lines I copied down because they struck me as being the Most Autistic. To note, it is frequently difficult at best to determine the degree of earnestness vs facetiousness displayed. He’s capable of being extremely earnest and extremely sassy, but thanks to atypical expression, especially in his earlier seasons, you can’t always tell which he’s going for. Some of these I mention in passing in various places, others are just here.

        -s11e2: “That was an attempt at a witticism.”, which comes after Murdoch fails to laugh at his question of whether he’s on the bride’s or groom’s side, and answers it as an earnest question of who will question whom.

        -s11e2: Just the ‘CRIMINY’ on entering WINE HEAVEN.

        -s11e2: “An unsolvable crime.” He says it so wistfully.

        -s11e6: “In terms of police work, no.” On being asked if he’s doing anything.

        -s11e6: “Has it occurred to you that we’re covered in human remains?” (it has, thanks)

        -s11e7: “It seems most people’s attention was captured by the accident.”

        -s11e12: Not a quote, and not Autistic but the way his hackles go UP when Brackenreid comes in complaining about left-footers and then he starts to calm after he’s told it’s catholics is… something. At least one person behind he scenes had to know this early on that A) Watts is gay, and B) the term left-footer was used for both gays and catholics, because that’s a reaction. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

        -s11e12: “I’ll admit I found it heartening to contemplate a miracle, if only for a passing moment.” I don’t know why this line struck me so deeply but it did-- perhaps given his deep interest throughout the episode in learning more about faith/belief.

        -s11e13: “This disappoints me, but I soldier on.”, in response to no one wanting to go out to lunch with him after the poisoning.

        -s11e13: not a quote, but the LOOK on his face when George levels his own personal worst accusation against Louise Cherry-- that she called Murdoch a bore-- speaks volumes. Another example of his inability to perceive the commonality between them.

        -s11e15: “Religions tend to produce many beautiful objects.” I mean there’s nothing very normal about the way he phrases this? 

        -s11e15: The “I once found a needle in a haystack.”

        -s11e15: The exchange with Jolson re discovering Watts’ Jewish background and how it ought to have been obvious- “Your tremendous sense of humor.”/”Are you being facetious?”

        -s11e15: Another exchange with Jolson- “All you need to be a Jew is to know how to cry and laugh at the same time.”/ “Oof. I have a lot to learn, then.: (possibly like how to do either in a way which reads to other people)

        -s11e15: “I suppose a woman is quite unlike a Danish fleet.” Now, considering everything else about him, he gives John good advice on the whole, but that… that one line really is being too Autistic and too gay to be asked for advice on women…

        -s11e15: “I’d inadvertently discovered that I’m Jewish.”-- not so much the line itself, which is delivered while sitting on a table, but the way that when both Brackenreid and Murdoch stare openly at him, he simply stares back while waiting on them to say the next thing in the conversation. Like, no awareness that he’s being STARED at.

        -s11e16: “When’s the baby coming?”, and after being told it was meant to be kept a secret, “How could they do that when everyone clearly knows what’s going on here?”

        -s11e18: “Blades large enough to bisect a homo sapien.” I just… the phrasing on this one!

        -s11e18: “See if any of their employees are murderers.” 

        -s11e18: “There’s an expression on your face that suggests you have a thought in your head.”

        -s11e18: “We’ll make this a two-coroner puzzle.” I mean it’s not the most Autistic line, it just tickled me.

        -s11e18: Regarding John’s phony vitamins and whether or not they’re healthful, “No, they’re not, but by all means enjoy.”

        -s11e18: The exchange with John about the victim who’d been disassembled in the abattoir-- “Removing a man’s limbs.”/ “And head.”/ “Yes, and head.” (this, before he punches the dead man’s timecard out)

        -s12e1: While trying to be enthusiastic about Murdoch’s house, which he loves but Murdoch doe not, yet-- “The light is, uh, pleasing.” (notable not just in that he’s awkwardly trying to say the right thing, but because it’s not the only time he talks about the light in a space and liking it)

        -s12e4: “You eat, you talk, you learn things.” Now here’s a social rule he can work with.

        -s12e4: Regarding the riot going on, “Thought you’d like to know.”

        -s12e7: “Given how events played out I was rather unlucky.”-- this regarding a gunshot wound.

        -s12e7: “The mind moves like a flock of starlings.” (I just like this line a lot? Here, about his thoughts being scattered, but he’s capable of using such evocative language, despite not following when others do the same.

        -s12e7: The broken “Then why don’t I feel better?”, on the subject of Justice falling from its pedestal?? I’m emotional about it every time.

        -s12e8: To Murdoch, re the spartan nature of the room they’re investigating-- “Even by your standards.” (not an Autism thing, except that they are both Autistic and have really become very much that pair of siblings who finish each other’s sentences… but will also just mess with each other)

        -s12e11: “Twas ever thus.” I’d say ‘why is this man like this??’ but I just wrote a twenty three page essay on the topic.

        -s12e11: Just his ENTIRE ‘Your feeling are irrelevant’ speech to John, about wide-ranging consequences and the uselessness of apologies is HIGHLY Autistic.

        -s12e11: Something about how he says ‘Not bollocks’. Not really a necessary rejoinder but I love how he says it.

        -s13e5: Not his line, but his reaction to Detective Scott’s “I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.” is just so… like, there’s a LOT of emotion going on but not a lot of facial expression? It’s one of his flattest moments of flat affect but there’s real pain in his eyes at being called out, intentionally or unintentionally. I really love every single moment he has in this episode but mostly it’s not for Autism reasons.

        -s13e5: Except for his “Do you mind if I… call you Jack?” which is so earnest and so vulnerable, and also there’s something that really kills me about the way that his voice falls rather than rising at the end of the question, and then followed by his inability to read the very clear signs Jack is giving him in return.

        -s13e8: His little “Fantastic.” on getting his ticket taken at the theater, like, somehow just hit me as a Moment?

        -s13e8: “Oh so you were raised rich.”, followed by his suggestion that Julia talk to the director about gems, or whatever rich people like.

        -s13e9: Just how many times he calls Jack MISTER WALKER in front of George.

        -s13e13: Regarding the question of whether Murdoch’s other neighbors will think he’s a murderer, his “That’s of no consequence.”

        -s13e16: “So you never gain an affection for the animals?”-- shortly followed by “I think I’m on the pig’s side now.”

        -s13e17: His very strained “I assumed you would.” when Edwards asks if he can join them, like… this is a man who wants very badly to be able to make a friend but does not want it to be happening the way that it’s happening now… 

        -s13e18: I feel real pain over “What kind is that?”, because like… he has to suspect which thing it is at this point, given what else has happened… except Edwards is at Station House One, where everyone already dislikes him, where who knows what Edwards might have been told about him if he’d asked around, just about his being unpleasant and weird, and so he’s waiting for it to be the worst case scenario, but he has to check, because he knows what about him is objectionable.