“It’s working, you’re making the team a unit,” says Fiona to Glen at the end of this week’s Critical.
It’s probably as reckless a statement as saying, “See you back in Blighty” during a War film, and almost certainly next week the team will be disbanded, or will be fiercely at loggerheads with each other, or Glen will be run over by a bus. But for now Fiona has a point.
Deftly fed into the episode, from a wink and a smile exchanged between Boyle and Ramesh, to Justin calling in a favour and Skyping in his microbiologist friend, even down to Glen knowing people’s names – there’s a real sense of them pulling together now.
And for herself the ‘strictly professional’ Fiona appears to have fallen for Glen’s charms if the final scene of them heading back to his digs is anything to go by. To be fair, I don’t think anybody will have been particularly surprised by that but surely she could have held out a little longer? He’s only been around for three episodes.
At one point, even department boss Clive (Peter Sullivan playing it absolutely straight, making him annoying but all too convincing) looked to be on team Glen – having complained about the casual rewriting of hospital policy he surprises us all by finishing with, “But the most important thing is that the patient didn’t die.”
Alas, it’s not the support it seems and as soon as Glen has left, Clive makes it very clear that he’s simply biding his time, avoiding confrontation until the upstart newcomer has gone (“[He]’s just a locum – he’s here one day and he’s gone tomorrow”) at which point things will presumably get back to ‘normal’.
In fact the team themselves are becoming increasingly more interesting than the details of each patient, even this week where the risk of infection caused them to go into lock down. Unusually, I felt this fell just a little flat in dramatic terms – there was a good deal of discussion about it but nobody seemed to be that worried.
Maybe I was expecting a little more hysteria and melodrama rather than them stoically getting on with the job, but downplaying the situation may have been realism at the expense of drama. Curiously for a hospital on shutdown, Dr Osgood was allowed to knock off early and go home (robbing herself of the chance to work on the patient’s pelvis in the process) which further confused the situation.
But the ongoing hospital politics, the jostling for resources, is fascinating – on the one hand, these are brilliant, skilled medical staff; on the other, they are constantly restricted or handicapped by the lack or the non-availability of resources. Getting blood out of the blood bank seems little easier than getting it out of a stone (every week poor Billy’s chasing them up, every week!) and after the past couple of weeks we’re all familiar with the scarcity of the aortic clamp.
So assuming this is not a totally imaginary portrayal of the health service, it does rather make you wonder how much is down to luck rather than skill. Quite a thought.
Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 17 March 2015 on Sky1.
> Order Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
What did you think of the episode? Let us know below…