Casualty plots getting ridiculous
Recently I stopped watching EastEnders regularly, as I found the plotlines were getting frustrating and repetitive and were going nowhere. Some would say that Casualty (and its week-night sister programme, Holby City) went the same way years ago, but I found the characters engaging enough and the stories believable enough to persist with them. The last few episodes, however, have been head-scratching affairs. I got a letter back in response to my complaint about the apparent ME sufferer who was beating his wife (a dismissal, essentially), but offensive or not, the storylines are getting preposterous and rather shoddy.
Last week (5th March), there was a story about a man with an obvious mental disability whose family were trying to get him to run away with them. It was not clear where he was living already, but when they got to his mother’s home, they found him dead. At the same time, some thugs were breaking down the door of the house, and it was not clear who they were intending to beat up, but his sister ended up dead and we weren’t shown how. Later on, at the hospital, the man confesses to having killed her, but we were left in the dark as to whether he had actually killed her or just thought he had, given that there were a gang of thugs breaking into the house and clearly wanted to attack someone, not just steal property.
This past week, a new consultant, an old friend of Nick Jordan who is apparently used to having her own way, found out that Jordan was recruiting a new doctor, in the absence of Ruth Winters who is in the psychiatric unit (although that particular day, she was on the loose and frantically buying fridges around town until her credit card ran out). The new woman said she knew just the man, and called him at his rural GP’s surgery. He said he had no wish to go back to being a hospital doctor, but very reluctantly agreed to the interview. Having returned to his practice, the consultant called him again and still persisted in demanding that he take the job and refusing to take “no” for an answer. She finished the call by saying that she was expecting him at 9am the next morning.
Well, one would expect that, as a GP, he wouldn’t be able to just down tools, and abandon any patients who might have arranged to see him and not bother finding a replacement, and just go to take a new job at a few hours’ notice. This is surely a quite unrealistic suggestion! I hope the depiction (particularly in Holby City) of doctors arguing amongst themselves while a patient is lying open in front of them is just as unrealistic.
