As if to compensate for last week’s comparatively bloodless outing this week’s episode of Critical has it everywhere – spouting into the air, pooling on the floor, spraying all over the staff…
Everywhere except staying inside the patient, who spends a good three quarters of an hour bleeding out – which is the sort of thing that happens if you’ve been savaged by a dog and end up with about a metre of your intestines missing.
The patient arrives with the dog still attached and forming a makeshift tourniquet, leading to perhaps the best opening of an episode so far as the trauma team squeeze themselves into the ambulance to try and prep the patient without antagonising the dog. When your patient is down two fingers and a testicle, and when treatment begins with the need to drill (yes, drill) a hole in the patient’s shin and another in his shoulder, then ‘critical’ is definitely the word to use.
But actually, for all the blood and guts (give or take a metre) I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that Critical isn’t really about medical procedures and hospital policy at all – it’s actually all about sex.
Of course it’s constricted by its self-inflicted real time format so the show can only talk about it rather than doing it, and maybe that’s why everybody is so preoccupied with it. After last week’s suggestions of a romantic liaison between Justin and Nerys, this week we find him lined up for more of the same with the ginger-haired radiographer.
“We’re in luck,” she whispers to Justin, tugging suggestively at the little finger of his rubber glove, “He’s on nightshift” – telling a lot of story in tremendously economical fashion; while Justin’s less than wholehearted smile in response tells a story of its own.
Elsewhere Ramakrishna and Harry are still discretely at it off duty, so discretely that it needs to be spelt out to Billy as he continues with his excruciatingly bad series of chat-up lines.
Again, there’s a wealth of feeling in Billy’s self-aware reply: “It’s good to know before I make a right tit of myself”. But it’s a kindness to have stopped him, even if it is a bit late – after trying the unusual tack of ‘you’re like my sister who I fancy’ last week, this week he tries ‘the history of the stethoscope’ in his attempts to woo Harry. Heaven knows what he would have thought up for Episode 11.
As for Glen and Fiona, I assumed that they’d already done the deed after going off together at the end of Episode 4 but it seems not given her surprised reaction to seeing his tattoo this week.
With them both in the process of undressing at the time it seems likely that surprised or not, nature will have followed its course after the credits. If not, maybe Glen can get a few pointers from Billy next week.
Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 28 April 2015 on Sky1.
> Order Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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