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shallowness) wrote2024-02-17 09:09 am
shallowness) wrote2024-02-17 09:09 am
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Back to the (historical and fictional) wards
My very brief take on the second episode of Expats, 'Mongkong' is that it was a less confusing flashback episode that helped explain many things, the main characters are still unsympathetic. Some boring bits.
Cardiac Arrest 2.1 The Shallow End
They definitely took the opportunity to retool the show slightly with a new series – I was delighted that they dropped the awful old credit sequence. Most, but not all old faces returned, but an indeterminate amount of time had passed to explain why. Long enough that Andrew was now an SHO, and he’d got married. Betancourt was gone, but we had an arrogant youngish surgical consultant who drove a Jag in his place. Raj was helping out with A&E, and it was all a lot more like ER. Matters seemed to be worse because a ward was closed, so patients were being treated in the corridors.
But the characterisation was still the same, Raj was the butt of jokes (including from the anaesthetist), still trying to score while his mother was trying to arrange a wife for him. Andrew was still decent, Claire could still wither people with the look of death. But the nice Scottish consultant seemed to be showing signs of dementia. The nurses remained an afterthought.
We had a new (not ugly) very junior doctor who wore braces, was posh and seemed to believe he knew everything. In their different ways, Andrew and Claire had to show him he didn’t. We had a new Aussie surgeon ‘Stiches’ who seemed likeable and capable but was played by Him off Neighbours, which I remember as being distracting in a Doylian sense at the time. (Now, it just makes me think, ‘aren’t we exporting doctors from the UK to Australia these days?’) He rollerblades in the corridors and expects nurses to put them away, which is a deeply unattractive trait. We had a new Welsh consultant, Yates, who was Andrew and Claire’s boss. He too hated management.
I know it had been set up that the Evil Hospital Manager was ill last season, but he abruptly died in what felt like screenwriter Jed Mercurio’s revenge against managers (i.e. on the nose.) It was also fairly obvious to the viewers, if not the staff who were just trying to see the next or most urgent-seeming patient and do the best for them, that the guy in the wheelchair wasn’t just a patient. I found his big reveal that he wasn’t disabled disappointing. From 2024, I’m just thinking it would have been more powerful if he was a wheelchair user throughout. I suspect they never considered that choice, but I also wonder whether the camera operator/director was relieved when he stood up. He was making a fair point about the terrible access for disabled people throughout the hospital (to the wrong people, it’s hardly the doctors’ fault), but then he turned into the new Evil Hospital Manager, just as Yates was reeling from a death of a patient he and Andrew had agreed ought to be sent to die at home, as per her family’s wishes. Of course, the support package wasn’t in place, so she was bedblocking either the guy who’d had to have surgery and then had a heart attack in a trolley, or the patient in a trolley that only Raj seemed to tend to, and kept being pulled away from. Who died.
On the whole, this was pretty good, although I felt I was only catching 75% of what was going on, what with the cameras being up in everyone’s grill and the fast-moving action and some terrible diction. But then you’d have the awful ‘this is moving’ music, or something being really on the nose, or a bit too different from the previous season, and the directorial choices felt showy-offy and not worth it. It’s glaringly nowhere near as diverse as it thinks it is (Claire is now the only female doctor in the hospital, for one thing.) More of the doctors are sympathetic – it’s striking that Andrew is no longer a baby doctor and it’s not about the seniority of doctors. The personal stuff seemed dialled down, although some of that may be that were focusing on resetting everything in this episode.
Cardiac Arrest 2.1 The Shallow End
They definitely took the opportunity to retool the show slightly with a new series – I was delighted that they dropped the awful old credit sequence. Most, but not all old faces returned, but an indeterminate amount of time had passed to explain why. Long enough that Andrew was now an SHO, and he’d got married. Betancourt was gone, but we had an arrogant youngish surgical consultant who drove a Jag in his place. Raj was helping out with A&E, and it was all a lot more like ER. Matters seemed to be worse because a ward was closed, so patients were being treated in the corridors.
But the characterisation was still the same, Raj was the butt of jokes (including from the anaesthetist), still trying to score while his mother was trying to arrange a wife for him. Andrew was still decent, Claire could still wither people with the look of death. But the nice Scottish consultant seemed to be showing signs of dementia. The nurses remained an afterthought.
We had a new (not ugly) very junior doctor who wore braces, was posh and seemed to believe he knew everything. In their different ways, Andrew and Claire had to show him he didn’t. We had a new Aussie surgeon ‘Stiches’ who seemed likeable and capable but was played by Him off Neighbours, which I remember as being distracting in a Doylian sense at the time. (Now, it just makes me think, ‘aren’t we exporting doctors from the UK to Australia these days?’) He rollerblades in the corridors and expects nurses to put them away, which is a deeply unattractive trait. We had a new Welsh consultant, Yates, who was Andrew and Claire’s boss. He too hated management.
I know it had been set up that the Evil Hospital Manager was ill last season, but he abruptly died in what felt like screenwriter Jed Mercurio’s revenge against managers (i.e. on the nose.) It was also fairly obvious to the viewers, if not the staff who were just trying to see the next or most urgent-seeming patient and do the best for them, that the guy in the wheelchair wasn’t just a patient. I found his big reveal that he wasn’t disabled disappointing. From 2024, I’m just thinking it would have been more powerful if he was a wheelchair user throughout. I suspect they never considered that choice, but I also wonder whether the camera operator/director was relieved when he stood up. He was making a fair point about the terrible access for disabled people throughout the hospital (to the wrong people, it’s hardly the doctors’ fault), but then he turned into the new Evil Hospital Manager, just as Yates was reeling from a death of a patient he and Andrew had agreed ought to be sent to die at home, as per her family’s wishes. Of course, the support package wasn’t in place, so she was bedblocking either the guy who’d had to have surgery and then had a heart attack in a trolley, or the patient in a trolley that only Raj seemed to tend to, and kept being pulled away from. Who died.
On the whole, this was pretty good, although I felt I was only catching 75% of what was going on, what with the cameras being up in everyone’s grill and the fast-moving action and some terrible diction. But then you’d have the awful ‘this is moving’ music, or something being really on the nose, or a bit too different from the previous season, and the directorial choices felt showy-offy and not worth it. It’s glaringly nowhere near as diverse as it thinks it is (Claire is now the only female doctor in the hospital, for one thing.) More of the doctors are sympathetic – it’s striking that Andrew is no longer a baby doctor and it’s not about the seniority of doctors. The personal stuff seemed dialled down, although some of that may be that were focusing on resetting everything in this episode.
no subject
I read somewhere that this show probably won't air in Hong Kong or China, and I didn't really get why until the protest movement appeared in episode 5. I think ep 5 was slightly better since it focuses more on our secondary characters and you care more about what may happen to them than the main players.
no subject
I'd read about the episode that changed the character perspective a bit. There was a (very peripheral) protest in the first episode, which I presumed was pro-democaracy - surprising that they got away with filming a more prominent one. I thought they did a good job of coaxing a good performance from the young child playing Gus in this episode.