Why yes, the recap photo WILL always be of Daniel Gillies. Why do you ask?

Hey gang, sorry about missing last week.  Big ouchies, and a hand in a splint.  Since I’m still a little ouchie, let’s get right to it, shall we?

Charlie’s medical-crisis-of-the-week is a case of pneumonia, which Alex discovers while snuggling up to his chest, since she is working a double and never actually leaves the hospital, the production having apparently not spent the money to build home sets for the characters.  She comes a little unglued at Charlie’s doctor for not catching it, but ultimately agrees with her that they should go sparingly with the antibiotics and let the fever run its course.  Charlie also passes some arbitrary time point at which he is no longer just “in a coma” but is in “a persistent vegetative state.”  Bummer!

Meanwhile, Spirit-Charlie is on hand to help out a punk kid who was brought into the ER with a stab wound.  Spirit-Punk Kid is not interested in this whole dying and moving on thing; he yells and gets all aggro at his traitorous body, which suddenly re-develops a heart-beat.  Spirit-Charlie is dumbfounded, and not a little jealous, wondering how the hell this punk has managed to do something he hasn’t been able to pull off.

Punk Kid is now in a coma though, which leads to another hella-annoying exchange with Spirit-Charlie, wherein he invisibly yells in the face of the guy who stabbed him, threatening to kill him and then his whole family.  What a charmer this guy is!  In the end, he yells at himself until he wakes from the coma, leading Spirit-Charlie to try the whole gettin’-aggro thing with himself, to no avail.  Someone needs to explain to Spirit-Charlie the premise of this show, methinks.  Awake or comatose, Punk Kid is a gift that just keeps on giving:  someone from his “posse” comes into the ER waiting area and opens fire, hitting the wife of a man who has been waiting roughly forever for x-rays of his wrist.

But hey, enough about the main characters — what’s up with Dr. Goran this week?  Dr. Goran is heading off to a surprise birthday party for Dr. Hamza, the surprise (for the viewers at least) being that Dr. Hamza actually has friends.  Or at least, he has a boyfriend who, despite having dated Hamza for a year and half, has not figured out that the last thing in the world that the socially awkward Hamza would appreciate is a surprise birthday party full of coworkers at a drag queen show.  Also at the party are Maggie, who has already announced to the world that she is banging Joel with public displays of affection at the hospital; and Gavin, who is seriously crushing on Maggie despite her utter cluelessness to the fact.

Joel gets a call from the hospital re: the wife who got shot and has to excuse himself from the party just in time to avoid having to get on stage for some sort of male revue, for which Gavin was dubbed “too scrawny.”  Once he has examined the patient, he wants to operate to remove the bullet from her spine right away, rather than waiting for swelling to go down and for her to be more stable, etc.  The husband is understandably hesitant to have his wife undergo life-threatening surgery.  Joel’s confidence in its success convinces the wife that having the surgery is preferable to the likelihood of ending up in a wheelchair, but the husband will not immediately “sign off” on it.

And excuse me, Show, but since when does a spouse have to “sign off” on a medical decision made by someone who is conscious and perfectly capable of making his/her own decisions?  I sincerely hope that this was actually the wife wanting to have her husband on-board and not a case where spousal consent has to actually be obtained, because if that’s the case then I will be getting a divorce post-fucking-haste.

When Joel expresses frustration with the delay, Alex goes off on him, saying that the husband doesn’t care if his wife ends up in a wheelchair, he just wants her to live, no matter what condition she’s in.  It’s perfectly obvious that Alex is talking about her and Charlie and not the couple in question, so when she accuses Joel of just wanting to show off, he doesn’t tell her she’s a fucking harpy bitch, as I might have been tempted to do.

In the end, Joel decides — as he is literally about to slice into the woman — that he will not do the intended procedure but will instead give the woman time to heal a little and stabilize rather than doing the risky surgery.  Besides, he has a drag queen show and a horny med-student to get back to!

***

*sigh*  Oh, Show…  Look, I’m in this thing for as long as Daniel Gillies continues to grace my screen, but this steady parade of medical-drama-cliches is really trying my patience.  It’s only episode four, and we already have a shooting in the hospital?  We’ve already had a Munchausen patient, the “don’t you die on mes…”

This is an interesting premise for a show, but could we please do something, you know, marginally original?  Or, in lieu of some original storytelling, some more of shirtless Joel getting his freak on?  Work with me, here!

The other problem, for me, is that Alex comes off as an uptight harpy and a hell of a downer, which is on the one hand completely understandable considering the situation with her fiance; if that were my loved one lying there in a PVS, I’d sure as hell be a harpy too.  But on the other hand, this is a TV show, and I need to be able to enjoy it without wanting to slap a bitch.  It’s a delicate balance, and the show hasn’t quite found it yet.  I am far more interested in the secondary characters than I am in the main two, over and above my Gillies-admiration, and that’s never a good sign for a show’s longevity.  I’m a little worried.

How many more cliche-ridden episodes are y’all in for before you bail?  Sound off in the comments!