The final part of ITV1’s latest medical drama brings the series to a suitably watchable conclusion, although this is not a Casualty-style blockbuster climax, with no major calamity leaving bodies strewn all over the landscape and the hospital struggling to cope under the weight of the blood and gore. Instead, it’s reflective, misty-eyed and outrageously pedestrian in pace – which, perhaps surprisingly, works perfectly, leading to an understated but uplifting ending to the episode and the series as a whole.
When a young girl with severe head injuries is brought to St Matthew’s Hospital, Monroe (James Nesbitt) has to confront the lingering grief which has haunted him since his daughter died in similarly tragic circumstances; and also face the guilt he feels at having been unable to share his pain with his wife Anna (Susan Lynch). The scene in which Nesbitt and Lynch discuss the aftermath of their daughter’s death is one of the highlights of the episode, peaking with the former’s hoarse-voiced, teary-eyed line: ‘I knew that if I let all that sorrow in – really let it in – it would just fucking bury me.’ You’d never know it was the same actor who phoned in (as it were) those dreadful Yellow Pages adverts.
James Nesbitt has been something of a revelation in this series, bringing an innate likeability and a hitherto unsuspected emotional depth to the character of Gabriel Munroe. While the series has at times struggled to live up to the high expectations set by its first episode (and also to find its way out of an identity crisis in which it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a British House, a neurosurgical Cracker or a Holby City with more black humour and less former soap stars), its lead actor’s performances have been strong enough to carry the programme through the dodgy patches.
Nesbitt has also been helped immeasurably by an excellent supporting cast – particularly Sarah Parish as Jenny Bremner – and a solid selection of guest actors, the best of whom has been Tom Maudsley, who excels in this final episode as the father of the injured young girl. His portrayal of numb, disbelieving grief is as moving as anything this series has had to offer.
Throughout the six episodes, music has been as integral a part of Monroe’s framework as the soft-focus, flash-cuts, extreme close-ups and the brief but unsettling flashes of highly-realistic human innards. This week, the episode closes – very aptly – with Willy Mason’s ‘We Can Be Strong’, which sums up the frazzled, yet undiminished sense of camaraderie between the main characters almost as well as Monroe himself does in his valedictory address to junior doctors Springer and Wilson (Luke Allen-Gale and Michelle Asante): ‘You need four things to become a surgeon: memory; manual dexterity; decision-making; and, most of all, the strength to come through those doors and do it all again after it’s gone wrong.’
Monroe hasn’t always been perfect, but its heart – not to mention its brain – has always been in the right place. A second series would be very welcome.
Airs at 9pm on Thursday 14th April 2011 on ITV1.