Season 1, Episode 3
Date of release: March 5, 2025 (Apple TV+)
Written by: Lisa van Brakel, Korbiniah Hamberger, Samuel Jefferson
Directed by: Fabian Möhrke
”How many people have you seen die? Oh my god, sorry. It's a weird thing to ask.”
“I stopped counting. But I also stopped counting the number of people I've saved.”
I expected that this show wouldn't focus heavily on the medical aspect of the characters' lives; it's all just one big and gloomy character drama, in which everyone suffers from some type of problem, whether it's PTSD, anxiety, drugs, or lying. It's a different kind of realism, as this medical drama portrays what it's like to be a broken person in the field of healthcare. American medical dramas have heroic doctors who wouldn't mind spending all the time they have saving a patient. KRANK BERLIN has characters who don't mind skipping out of work for the sake of making themselves feel better.
The doctors on this show aren't interested in being the “heroes in white.” They are all their own kinds of messes, and they would probably be healthier in their minds and souls if they would just stop working here and do something more calm with their lives. Ben wants to be high all the time; Dr. Kohn wants to lie to his boss, so that he doesn't have to explain why he failed during a trauma case; Dr. Ertan just wants to get the hell out of there (she is the most understandable character at this moment); and Dr. Parker only wants this emergency room to function and not fall apart as the pressure cooker slowly but surely comes up with a dangerous mixture that could blow them all up.
The latter especially had me wondering about how long this ER had been working with lax rules and no regulations. The drugs were not locked up, patients weren't being tracked via charts, the admin desk didn't know which rooms were occupied or available, and apparently, when patients who are coding come in via the elevator (presumably because they were choppered in?), they are treated in the elevator, instead of being rolled into a proper room. I can understand that someone like Parker would be disgusted by the look of this ER, wanting to get it more organized and legit. The fact alone that doctors could just take drugs out of the lock-up without signing them off seems like one surefire way to get this hospital closed immediately. Who knows how many drug addicts are working there, and how angry they are going to be, now that they have found out their access to drugs has just dried up.
Meanwhile, Olivia shows herself as a young paramedic, unsure of what to do with herself on the job, while her partner Olaf seems like a person who has seen it all and has had enough of it, just waiting for the moment to end it for himself. Parker and Ben, on the other hand, might not be so different after all, with her ending up in a club, drowning in the trance of the music and alcohol, just like how his journey began during the first minutes of the show. Who knows, maybe the two will become best friends after all, now that he has stapled her scalp laceration – for once, they weren't headbutting over the job they were doing.
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| No more free drugs for this addict. |
