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rachelcapie
Reviews
The Good Doctor: Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices (2021)
They made it all about race but that didn't make sense.
Generally a great season so far but this episode kind of bugged me. Maybe, as a European, I'm missing something here but the whole racial profiling story didn't make sense to me.
So a black woman is wheeled into ER shouting and raving, her symptoms suggest a diagnosis. She claims (while still apparently delusional) that she has been taking a medication which the doctors can't find. So Dr Browne makes a judgement call and doesn't believe the delusional patient.
Then follows a whole load of stuff about how med school teaches med students that black people lie, apparently (maybe they do, I'm not disputing this, I'm not American or a doctor, so I've no idea). And Claire has to re-evaluate her own judgement and then apologise for judging based on racial profiling. Tears, lesson learned etc.
Except... If a middle aged white guy had been wheeled in with the same comportment and symptoms, claiming to be taking a medication that couldn't be shown, she would have made exactly the same judgement call.
The patient is out of their mind, not rational, there is no good reason to trust their word.
If, instead of weeping and apologising, Claire had stood up to that woman and said "You were out of your mind and we couldn't find the meds, so no, I didn't believe you. Sorry, my bad." This episode would maybe merit a 7 rather than a 4.
They made an it all about race but it wasn't logical because it was behaviour and evidence that caused that judgement call, not the colour of the patient's skin.
The trans-man pregnancy story was sweet though, and sensitively handled.
Explained: Your Skin (2021)
Mostly informative but...
This episode was very interesting, I learnt a lot of stuff I didn't know. The narration (which can be hit and miss with "Explained") was well done.
But for some reason the writers felt it was important to stick in a few minutes of irrelevant (for the subject being discussed) social commentary on the racism of soap advertising. This might have been less obvious if they had also discussed, for example, the differences between advertising targeting and skin care between the genders. But they didn't do that. It felt forced, and I felt like I was being preached at, not educated. If the series wants to pursue social and political commentary perhaps it would be better to make some new, more relevant episodes. "Racism, explained", "Sexism, explained", "BLM, explained", I'd watch those with interest, as long as they retained their objectivity.
Explained: Royalty (2021)
Biased and not well thought out.
Great series, shame about this episode. A very one sided, politicised discussion of royalty in general and the British royal family in particular. I'm not a royalist but it really felt like they were out to blame the state of the world on the royals. More focus on the facts and less focus on opinions.
The New World (2005)
Dreadful just doesn't cover it...
What a pretentious, awful, waste of time and money. I had never seen a Terence Malick film before and shall hope to never see one again, and I'll be avoiding Colin Farrell too after this and "Alexander". "Poetry" and waving fields of grass does not equal art. David Thewlis was OK, which is very sad as he's usually fantastic, but a small bright spot in this turgid tale. It's not because you want to make a beautiful film that there can't be a decently told story, and it's not because you think you're a poet or an artist that you have the right to bore the crap out of a paying audience. Honestly, if you want to see a film about Pocahontas then go with the Disney version, at least there's a couple of catchy tunes...