Aaron gives an approving nod at Mercy's improving clip-chart...

Let me bring anyone up to speed on the show who somehow managed to stumble onto this page without ever having seen an episode... like my mother, who lives to see my name in print, even on a website.

Veronica Callahan (Taylor Schilling) is a nurse at Mercy Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. For those unaware of Jersey City’s location: you can see Manhattan from every window, hilltop and balcony, just like the Eiffel Tower in every non-French movie set in Paris. Veronica served in Iraq and has returned with PTSD at about an eight on a scale of one to ten. She is an alcoholic with a stereotypically alcoholic Irish-American family. She was married to her high school sweetheart, Mike (Diego Klattenhoff), whom she cheated on in the Middle East with a doctor, Chris (James Tupper), who, to give us a plot, got a job at the same hospital our heroine works in, not knowing she was married when they were together.

"Despite the pilot being almost insultingly clichéd and the other first half-dozen episodes doing little to advance the characters, the show found its stride around episode ten or eleven"

Joining Veronica at the nurses’ station are Sonia Jimenez (Jaime Lee Kirchner), a high-maintenance girl trying not to be; the obscenely naïve, fresh-out-of-nursing-school Chloe Payne (Michelle Trachtenberg); and Angel Garcia (Guillermo Diaz), whose only personality traits so far are to be gay and give good advice no one follows. Also filling out the main cast are Dr Briggs (James Van Der Beek), a prickish physician intent on improving productivity at Mercy no matter whom it pisses off (which he appears to delight in doing) and Dr Harris (James LeGros), who alternates between wanting to fire Veronica for her many defects of character and keeping her around because the plot won’t let him get rid of her, no matter how bad she fucks up.

Despite the pilot being almost insultingly clichéd and the other first half-dozen episodes doing little to advance the characters, the show found its stride around episode ten or eleven (I wasn’t keeping track at that point) when Veronica’s life begins to fall apart following a separation from Mike and Chloe begins to grow up (and a backbone) when she discovers her firefighter boyfriend is married.

Though it lacks the pilot’s nightmares of random violence, the show is now getting deeper into Veronica’s PTSD following an attempted doughnut shop robbery in which her basic training kicked in and she killed the robber. I’ll drop more backstory in as it becomes relevant, since the episode has finished downloa-- A-HEM!! damn cough -- is about to start.

The episode begins with a jittery Veronica in a session with her new shrink (Mary Stuart Masterson, whose character is listed on imdb and Wikipedia as “Therapist” and, near the end of the episode is called “Denise”... we’ll call her Dr Watts), which she cuts short after her litany of emotional and social problems are finally said out loud: Anger management (two episodes ago she thrashed the mother/pimp of a twelve-year-old patient and early in the season, she threw a cinderblock through Dr Harris’ windshield), alcohol issues (she is an alcoholic, her family is comprised of alcoholics and her sort-of ex-husband owns the bar she and her friends drink at), panic attacks (sometimes she shuts down under stress), nightmares (which we haven’t seen since the first scene of the pilot, one of the only things that episode did right), “and flashbacks, of course--” the shrink manages to get out before Veronica rabbits. Of course, having mentioned the lack of Veronica’s first-episode nightmares, she has one at the beginning of the very next scene. Maybe I should wait until the episode is done before I write these reviews.

Forty minutes later, now I have.

I think that’s why you mostly see “recaps” of ongoing tv shows around the interwebs instead of “reviews”: due to the extended, episodic nature of a tv series, it’s a lot easier to recount the events of the episode, link them to previous plots and give an opinion on whether it was time well spent (like every episode of Deadwood) or forty-four to forty-six minutes you’ll never get back. Because it’s necessary to comment on the narrative flow of a story that’s in its eighteenth of at least twenty-two hours instead of a single, roughly two hour runtime, “recapping” seems a better way to comment on tv than “reviewing,” which involves judging something mostly on its own merits and how it relates to itself.

So, continuing with the recap: Chloe’s PotW (Patient of the Week) is a cute college football star who tries to flirt with her (and is very un-creepy and quite nice about it), but manages to always do so in front of a doctor, who always seeks to remind him (to Chloe’s chagrin, as she’s very into him), that it is inappropriate for a nurse to date a patient. He’s in for a scan of his wrist but ends up treated for a concussion, facilitating an excuse for him to stick around the hospital and make lovey-eyes at Chloe, whose romantic misadventures form a counterpoint to Veronica and Sonia’s failings.

"Getting to the meat of Veronica’s problems is what has finally given this show its legs, rather than the half-season abandonment it was hurtling towards"

Two weeks ago, Sonia made sex with the son of an elderly patient she was hospice nursing on the side for, cheating on her NYPD boyfriend. Sonia is scared of becoming a cop’s wife and the lack of funds, security and, well, funds that entails. He finds out, of course, and gives her the heave-ho, leaving Sonia to mope while assisting in the suicide of said patient, which bites her in the ass at the end of this episode when, after twice humiliating herself in front of her ex, she’s visited by what appears to be an insurance-related detective wanting to know a little more about the woman’s death.

Veronica, who picked back up with Chris, her war-fling, a few episodes ago, is having trouble opening up to Dr Watts, whose well-adjusted calmness rattles Veronica to the core. She sees her everyday, setting up a framework for the episode where she can talk to someone about her more-or-less perpetual tendency to make the wrong decision personally and professionally (with the two sometimes overlapping). It serves the same narrative purpose as a voiceover narration, but is far, far less lazy.

After telling a failed lie to Chris about a botched experimental heart surgery with Dr Briggs (who I so want to refer to as Dr Dawson), and one too many times of getting called out on being an alcoholic by Dr Watts, Veronica snaps in the final session of the episode. Getting up to storm out once again, she wheels around to ask her therapist, in an effort to defend her dependence on booze to soften all the edges of her life, “If you can explain to me how you can watch a little Iraqi kid bleed out after getting both of his arms blown off and not need a drink, I am all ears.” Without missing a beat, and with her annoying, yet unpretentious calm intact, Watts looks her dead in the eye and tells her about flying Black Hawks in the first Gulf War and the wreck it made of “two marriages [and] a lot of friendships,” but how a great deal of psychological help allows her to talk about it without needing a couple of drinks.

Getting to the meat of Veronica’s problems is what has finally given this show its legs, rather than the half-season abandonment it was hurtling towards. With Chloe continuing to slide away from her introduction as a ham-fisted cliché and Sonia’s ongoing and new problems, I hope the series can keep up the quality it took so long to muster.

Best line: After shutting down footballer-guy’s attempt to chat up Chloe, Dr Dawson sums up his entire character in one sentence:

Chloe: “Hey! What is wrong with you? Why do you have to butt in and embarrass people?”

Briggs: (takes a beat to think) “I just like to do stuff and see what happens; it’s what drew me to science.”

Top 10 Mindf**k Movies	Top 10 images of distant horror in the movies	Top 20 lunatic cameos in movies	The supernatural catfight that Marvel Comics lost in the 1970s

FOLLOW SHADOWLOCKED ON TWITTER

FOLLOW SHADOWLOCKED ON FACEBOOK