Date of airing: August 9, 2011 (Global)
Audience viewership information: 1.304 million viewers
COMBAT HOSPITAL continues with yet another interesting episode making the case for a chance in a medical procedure and telling its audience that it is hard to be a doctor or a nurse in the middle of a war zone. I just cannot understand why the show wasn’t more of a hit in the United States and why everyone seemed to not have bothered looking past its faulty “GREY’S ANATOMY in Afghanistan” tagline. I also cannot understand why the critics didn’t see the good things in this show, although I can assume they couldn’t discover the good things because they never watched past the first episode. I guess COMBAT HOSPITAL is a prime example of how television viewers’ nerves are on edge when it comes to drama TV and that no one wants to spend more than an hour on a show when it’s not good enough immediately. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and COMBAT HOSPITAL is a special case for me, because I happened to like it when no one else did. These cases do exist – I am also a big fan of SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL, and that film is hated by almost everyone. Also, it’s a thing that happens regularly with me and TV shows canceled after only one season (DEFYING GRAVITY, GIRLBOSS, BEN AND KATE, STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP).
Anyway, I liked how the writers were tackling the stories and characters this time around, mixing them together and still keeping the show as authentic as possible while also being as dramatic as it can be. The pace of the stories is still super-fast, and sometimes there are cases of rapid editing that swallows up a story and dumps it into the pool of the forgotten, but after eight episodes, it has become noticeable how strong the focus has become on the more important stuff in the episode while keeping the rest fun and light and possibly unimportant, even if those moments give some of the other characters screentime for a change. I am still surprised about how this show works so well as an ER ripoff set in Kandahar without overstepping its lines or overdoing stories. I did not expect this to happen at all, which makes COMBAT HOSPITAL a better series than it has any right to be.
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| Step one to identify a lost child: Take a picture. |
I loved Bobby’s difficult case. I can somewhat understand that he didn’t know if he wanted to continue the 100 percent success record or if he sincerely wanted to save the woman’s life and failed to properly calculate her third-degree burns. Realistically, he wouldn’t remember how this case began after so much sleep deprivation and so many things happening with the patient, especially when half of the hospital is bad-mouthing behind Bobby’s back. It was a great story, bringing a lot of drama into the show, which seriously needed some real emotional connections between some of the characters, with Bobby and Rebecca being the closest pair there is after they have been friends ever since looking for the hospital in the opening scenes of the premiere episode. Plus, the story allowed Bobby to showcase what he is all about when he is leading patient treatment. Because now we know how far he can go as a diagnostician and how far he is willing to go when the odds are stacked against him.
The sexy side hustle with Suzy was interesting as well, but only because it somewhat came out of nowhere (her criticism was based on professionalism, but as soon as they are in private, it’s still all about affection and just sex), after their relationship previously didn’t really seem to go anywhere after the moment of sexy zen in the back of the truck. I would have liked to see more of a confrontational version of Suzy, however. Finally, there was a conflict between nurses and doctors in this show, as there always should be in medical dramas, but the nurses were mostly represented by Will, making it a Will-issue mostly. Some of the nurses could have made their cases to Bobby as well. That Rebecca was involved in the matter as well was also a thing of intrigue, and not just for her developing friendship with Bobby. At this point in the show, they are going through thick and thin together, they respect each other’s decisions, and they are always ready to support one another, no questions asked. That’s not only a wonderful thing to witness between the two colleagues (as Colonel Marks has stated), but being part of a multi-nation military mission, it makes for interesting storytelling when two friends can look past the chaos and mayhem and still respect each other enough to do their job well.
Will’s little story was of course carried by him taking care of a kid – that by itself wasn’t much of a story, but at least we got to see a little more of Will in this episode. He was probably the main character of the hour, considering he was in two different stories. Sadly, both of them weren’t quite developed for his sake. The nurses vs. doctors clash could have been bigger with Will in the center, and his relationship with the kid could have been more meaningful to somebody other than him. Okay, the kid was there for Bobby’s patient when she needed someone to hold hands with, but other than that I don’t know why the kid had so much screentime when it wasn’t just about giving Will screentime.
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| Hands up! Don't touch yourself! |
In the meantime, the random story of the week about Private Marvers seemed okay, but a little tedious at times. I didn’t quite know if I should have laughed about his “psychological problem,” or if I should have taken it seriously and as an attempt at portraying PTSD in a different light. In the end, there was something touching (pun intended) about the story though, when Marvers apparently broke the cycle of putting his hands into his pants for some relief, serving a happy ending (pun intended) for his story, and another day of hope for him that he is not losing it in Kandahar. There is a but, and I’m completely serious: How can someone think that somebody touching themselves in stressful situations is a somewhat normal thing under the circumstances? I get Grace’s reasoning that everyone deals with stress differently (and like I said, it’s part of defining individual cases of PTSD), but the scene with Marvers and Grace in the men’s washroom was just weird and irritating. It was supposed to play for a bit of laughter, but it didn’t work as intended for me.
