It appeared to be a standard practice of the era that if a television program called for an unattractive woman, the film makers would actually cast someone who was at least average looking and not really unsightly. It happened a few times in both of Hitchcock's series, one that comes to mind is "Beast in View". I didn't think there was anything wrong with the way nurse Ellen Hatch (Colleen Dewhurst) looked. She was simply made to look plain for the most part, and when the script called for it, she improved her looks with the fancier hair style.
I'm going to take a different approach from most of the other reviewers for this episode. It seemed to me that the script was at odds with itself when it came to the story's payoff. At the conclusion of the episode, it appeared that nurse Hatch was helping out the police in their effort to catch the second killer of a fellow officer. So then why would she have been disappointed when she learned that Jerry Walsh (Tom Simcox) had a younger and prettier girlfriend after she helped him escape from the hospital. It's true that her lack of self-esteem came from being unmarried and perhaps without prospects, and that she might have been temporarily drawn to Walsh as he played to her emotions and charmed her with comments about her 'natural beauty'. But if she really was helping Walsh escape and reunite with his criminal partner, she would have expressed surprise that the cops were right outside the apartment building that they followed her to. She leaves crestfallen into the night, but you would think that would have been offset by the fact that she helped apprehend a cop killer. Clinching this idea is the fact that the police, in particular Detective Sergeant Martinez (Joe De Santis), didn't even consider arresting her as an accomplice, which would have been the case if she was really planning to help Walsh escape.
I'm going to take a different approach from most of the other reviewers for this episode. It seemed to me that the script was at odds with itself when it came to the story's payoff. At the conclusion of the episode, it appeared that nurse Hatch was helping out the police in their effort to catch the second killer of a fellow officer. So then why would she have been disappointed when she learned that Jerry Walsh (Tom Simcox) had a younger and prettier girlfriend after she helped him escape from the hospital. It's true that her lack of self-esteem came from being unmarried and perhaps without prospects, and that she might have been temporarily drawn to Walsh as he played to her emotions and charmed her with comments about her 'natural beauty'. But if she really was helping Walsh escape and reunite with his criminal partner, she would have expressed surprise that the cops were right outside the apartment building that they followed her to. She leaves crestfallen into the night, but you would think that would have been offset by the fact that she helped apprehend a cop killer. Clinching this idea is the fact that the police, in particular Detective Sergeant Martinez (Joe De Santis), didn't even consider arresting her as an accomplice, which would have been the case if she was really planning to help Walsh escape.