90s doctors' woes
Jan. 27th, 2024 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessCardiac Arrest - 1.5 Turning Out the Light
It had been about a month since I last watched this show, partly because of the half-hour length, oddly enough, partly because of the tone, but it’s also that some bits of it are not so good. (We’re coming to the end of the first series, and I sincerely hope they change the credits for the second series.) All the stuff involving Monica had ‘arty’ shots, but I was confused if her husband (?) was a hallucination. However it was shot, the way she was drinking was so OTT. (She’d failed her exam, Raj had clocked the drinking.)
Raj, who had a lot of airtime at the start of the episode, was/is a victim of the comedy-drama. Cartoonish sexism when he saw that one of the patients’ relatives was a fit young woman! Continuing prank wars with the nurses (who pulled one off where he thought he was about to be sacked)! More stereotypical south-Asian mum wants to matchmake guff, and then he started worrying that the patient with the hot daughter was seriously ill, got stuck with Monica’s work—she’s higher up than him, then she went walkabout, and it’s tonally uneven and because of the gross sexism, I don’t want to give him the time of day.
And he’s a doctor! The show is completely biassed towards doctors, nurses being depicted as two-dimensional beings (who have better work conditions than junior doctors.) At least the gender balance was diffused in this episode with two new male nurses, one giving Claire grief (not that she couldn’t manage him) and one who I thought was gay, but probably wasn’t seeing as he pulled the nurse Andrew has had a burgeoning then stuttering romance with.
Poor Andrew, who was working shift after shift, so his romantic life was all bleary apologies, and then his consultant/management said they were extending his sleep deprivation/shift. But, again, this was spelt out in capital letters and bold text, (wait, was that really the callous manager who had had probably had a heart attack and had to be treated by sleep-deprived Andrew??? Yes, it was.) This put Claire unequivocally on the side of the good guys, as Betancourt (nice to see a fairly hairy chest, BTW) boasted that they – the consultants and management cabal – hadn’t even tried to look for a locum, and just dumped the shift on Andrew because it was cheaper. Her reaction? Priceless. And she managed to do it and explain why (Andrew had hod enough consideration to give her a sandwich, while the cabalists hadn’t enough consideration for junior doctors or their patients to let them have some sleep so they could function) in character.
Andrew was mildly troubled by the fact that he was becoming callous about treating overdoses and wishing more patients would die in the ambulance, but this was on like his sixth back-to-back shift, and the final scene had him burnishing his halo some more.
Ah well, all this was the first step in Jed Mercurio’s career.
It had been about a month since I last watched this show, partly because of the half-hour length, oddly enough, partly because of the tone, but it’s also that some bits of it are not so good. (We’re coming to the end of the first series, and I sincerely hope they change the credits for the second series.) All the stuff involving Monica had ‘arty’ shots, but I was confused if her husband (?) was a hallucination. However it was shot, the way she was drinking was so OTT. (She’d failed her exam, Raj had clocked the drinking.)
Raj, who had a lot of airtime at the start of the episode, was/is a victim of the comedy-drama. Cartoonish sexism when he saw that one of the patients’ relatives was a fit young woman! Continuing prank wars with the nurses (who pulled one off where he thought he was about to be sacked)! More stereotypical south-Asian mum wants to matchmake guff, and then he started worrying that the patient with the hot daughter was seriously ill, got stuck with Monica’s work—she’s higher up than him, then she went walkabout, and it’s tonally uneven and because of the gross sexism, I don’t want to give him the time of day.
And he’s a doctor! The show is completely biassed towards doctors, nurses being depicted as two-dimensional beings (who have better work conditions than junior doctors.) At least the gender balance was diffused in this episode with two new male nurses, one giving Claire grief (not that she couldn’t manage him) and one who I thought was gay, but probably wasn’t seeing as he pulled the nurse Andrew has had a burgeoning then stuttering romance with.
Poor Andrew, who was working shift after shift, so his romantic life was all bleary apologies, and then his consultant/management said they were extending his sleep deprivation/shift. But, again, this was spelt out in capital letters and bold text, (wait, was that really the callous manager who had had probably had a heart attack and had to be treated by sleep-deprived Andrew??? Yes, it was.) This put Claire unequivocally on the side of the good guys, as Betancourt (nice to see a fairly hairy chest, BTW) boasted that they – the consultants and management cabal – hadn’t even tried to look for a locum, and just dumped the shift on Andrew because it was cheaper. Her reaction? Priceless. And she managed to do it and explain why (Andrew had hod enough consideration to give her a sandwich, while the cabalists hadn’t enough consideration for junior doctors or their patients to let them have some sleep so they could function) in character.
Andrew was mildly troubled by the fact that he was becoming callous about treating overdoses and wishing more patients would die in the ambulance, but this was on like his sixth back-to-back shift, and the final scene had him burnishing his halo some more.
Ah well, all this was the first step in Jed Mercurio’s career.
