The nice slow character builds could prove a stumbling block without a second season...

“There is No Superwoman”

A month ago, I started reviewing this show. I did not know, however, that it was the last episode before a four-week hiatus. When we pick up with the crew at Mercy Hospital, Veronica is still hallucinating about her experience at the doughnut shop, Sonia is being investigated for her part in Lauren, her hospice patient’s, death and Chloe is contemplating a romance with a local college football player while her personality hardens due to her and Angel’s transfer to the emergency room.

The episode opens on the nursing trio, mistakenly dolled up for a cocktail party, walking into Andy the Football Player’s frat house during a party. Feeling foolish while Sonia and Veronica gobble free drinks and flirt with some college kids, Chloe opts to bail on the party. Later the women sit in Chloe’s car, consuming pilfered beer and pizza while the youngest nurse decides to not see Andy due to his youth and lack of experience (he’s probably twenty or twenty-one, she’s about twenty-four). “He gave you pizza and beer; where I come from, you rush that man to the altar,” Veronica kind of slurs, her tenuous sobriety already crushed.

When they settle on renting a video and getting some more beer, Veronica dips into a convenience store only to see Deanna, the girl from the doughnut shop whose life she failed to save, behind the counter. She pulls it together long enough to attempt to pay for the beer and a coffee, but when a black guy enters the store and sidles up to the counter, Veronica loses her grip and has a panic attack.

I like the slow pace they’re taking with Veronica’s mental health; on another show, the writers might choose to rush through the subplot, but in this character’s case, it’s her main plotline - it defines her character. The show took so long to finally start dealing with her problems that it’s not just going to ignore them for convenience’s sake or wave a magic wand over them, which is actually kind of refreshing.

Chloe is not adjusting very well to her exile in the ER. A softie at heart, it’s hard for her to build up the callous she needs to work amongst the unwashed masses. Her PotW is a single mother of three who has been waiting to get dealt with for twelve hours - she’s cranky, her kids are hungry and it burns when she pees. Chloe, emotionally cornered by this woman, gives her lunch to the kids before scurrying as fast as she can into the nurses’ station. Turns out her patient, once treated, was given the wrong prescription and could very well die, prompting Chloe to try and track her down.

The private investigator on Sonia’s ass has been poking around the hospital and Lauren’s insurance company has ordered an autopsy, the results of which Dr Harris, being the attending physician, is privy to. Turns out the massive amount of morphine Sonia provided for her to end her life is what killed her, not her illness, big shock. She denies any knowledge of how a woman without the physical strength to open a bottle could have killed herself, digging her own hole deeper with every sentence. This is another subplot/character arc that’s taking its time (in a good way) to go somewhere. You know, maybe that’s not actually that impressive and watching how Glee blatantly ignores its own subplots has warped my perceptions of what speed a show should move at.

Veronica’s session with Dr Watts (who now has an actual name, Dr Denise Cabe, but I’m gonna keep calling her “Watts”) is spent talking about inconsequential trivium, until the last possible moment when she nonchalantly blurts out that she broke up with Chris, had a panic attack and has been drinking, creating fuel for the next day’s session.

When Sonia commandeers the karaoke microphone at Mike’s bar, he calls Veronica to rescue her from herself. In the women’s room, after Sonia finishes puking up three Long Island Ice Teas (I wonder what that drink is called in other countries), Veronica asks her where she learned to drink like that. “From you, alright? I learned it by watching you!”* Sonia quotes back at her, once again reminding me that there are characters on tv younger than me (Veronica graduated high school in 2000) who have real jobs, while I live, unemployed, in my mother’s basement. Sonia refuses to confide her real trouble in Veronica, whom she claims has become increasingly closed off.

When Chloe decides to go to her PotW’s apartment after attempts to reach her by phone or by cop disintegrate, Dr Dawson appears to flirtingly taunt her as Andy shows up to not necessarily “confront” her, but to suss out why she broke off their nascent relationship via text, of all impersonal things. He offers to drive Chloe to the shitty neighborhood the PotW lives in, being a better idea than letting her walk to what Dr Dawson refers to as “the corner of Gang and Rape.” This relationship can only end badly, being foreshadowed as it is by their meeting over his brain being damaged, something I’m certain will come back to strangle their eventual fleeting happiness.

In Veronica’s next session, she talks about her early days as a nurse, mopping up pools of blood in Iraq and watching soldiers and children dying because she wasn’t skilled enough to save them. Watts uses this to zero in on the root of Veronica’s problem: she feels responsible for Deanna’s death, having missed treating the bullet hole in her back while fixing the one in her leg, resulting in her bleeding out.

She dismisses the idea of “having done her best” as an poor excuse for failure. She refuses to let go of the guilt, not just of the deaths she couldn’t prevent, but also for everything in her life that has caused another person harm. “I just can’t help thinking, ‘What if?’,” she says through tears. “That,” Watts explains, “is how you go crazy.”

So Chloe saves her PotW while Adam feeds the woman’s kids, allowing a moment for her to see past his youth and immaturity, prompting her to agree to go on an actual date with him. Veronica’s breakthrough in therapy enables her to open up to Sonia and Chloe about the doughnut shop incident while sitting in the same shop. She finally comes to terms with the fact that she not only couldn’t have saved the girl no matter what she did, but that she did more than either of her friends would have been able to do, being prone, as they would admit, to running or hiding, neither of which Veronica did.

The episode was a touch short, about forty minutes and change and the story didn’t really get moving until almost half-way in, but the three leads’ plots were furthered well (again, not something I think I should be impressed by, but find that I am), and with only three episodes left in the season, it appears to be on track to a good stopping point. However, the program hasn’t been picked up for a second season and is slowly bleeding away viewers, with each successive episode catching fewer than the last.

The quality of the show is such that I would like to see the story continued for another twenty-two segments, but that it took so long to get to that level makes me think that it might not last through a second season, so it wouldn’t really be a massive loss if the fledgling drama was dropped over the summer. After all, there’s plenty of new shows every season and who knows that the future will bring?

Favorite Scene Snippet

(Veronica has been staring at a hallucination of Deanna)

Dr Harris - What are you staring at?

Veronica - I’m afraid to tell you. Can your opinion of me get any lower?

Dr Harris - (deadpan) Try me.

Veronica - I saw the dead girl from the doughnut shop. I keep thinking that I see her.

Dr Harris - (long beat) My wife’s still in the house; sometimes I see her out of the corner of my eye.

Veronica - Is it scary?

Dr Harris - No... but it makes me a little sad. I don’t know what it will take, to make the dead finally rest.

* In case you’re too young, or they didn’t have that PSA in your country, give this a whirl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Elr5K2Vuo

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