Anyone remember House? I used to like that show up until they got rid of most of the supporting cast except never mind no they didn’t, but in hindsight my presiding memory of it is that scene where House goes to tell the 15-year-old he’s been horning on the whole episode that she’s intersex and acts all disgusted while the literal child strips naked and insists she’s a girl. House sucked. Hugh Laurie’s great in it, though.
Anyway, there’s a lot of medical shows this season. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence and not at all influenced by current events.
So this is less a straight medical show and more a paranormal thing, but there are already doctors who treat diseases caused by stress. They’re called doctors. Stress is a killer, man; it’ll fuck you up both physically and mentally. I can understand making a supernatural allegory out of it (that’s what Puberty Syndrome in the Rascal Does Not Dream Of… series is, for example), but for whatever reason it kinda doesn’t land here. Maybe it’s the weird implication that normal doctors aren’t aware of the extremely basic medical fact that stress makes people sick, or maybe these types of stories just work better when the protagonist isn’t claiming to be a medical professional. I dunno.
I don’t like Dr Sprite. He was established as a bit of an asshole right of the bat, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but he’s also a moron who didn’t seem to realize that giving a child something that forced them to tell the truth and then sending them home to an obviously abusive parent could end very, very badly for the child. I get what he was trying to do (partly because it’s obvious and partly because he flat out states what he was obviously doing), but intentionally causing a situation that could just as easily escalate the abuse as help to end it is bad patient care. It’d be one thing if she was a financially independent adult, but she’s a child who is wholly dependent on her abuser for survival. He could’ve gotten her killed, and the lack of acknowledgement (aside from a vague comment about ‘drastic treatment’) doesn’t sit right with me.
‘Nobody lives their whole life without troubling others’ is a good moral and something that more people (especially more DFAB people) need to internalize, but the way the doctor went around teaching it was unconscionably reckless and, again, could’ve very easily gotten Koto killed. It was only random luck that he happened to drop the spy cam and it happened to turn on so he could happen to be there when she collapsed from overusing the contact lenses that things worked out. It was equally lucky that the mom eventually decided she cared more about her daughter than her stuff (though she could’ve just realized that she could always change literally nothing and just buy new stuff), but the fact that she had to think about it as hard as she did makes it pretty clear that the right thing to do in that situation would’ve been to remove Koto from her care, at least temporarily.
This episode made me really, really mad. On one hand, I haven’t gotten properly mad at a premier in a while so that was kinda fun, but on the other I’m really, really mad at it. If you want a medical show, there’s two Cells at Work this season, and if you want a show about psychological issues turning into paranormal ailments that isn’t infuriating, watch Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai. This isn’t badly made but I hate it and I won’t be watching any more of it.
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Heinz Special Random Joke Sauce:
- Man, imagine if the little girl had cried hot sauce. She’d probably have gone blind.
- Can grade schoolers who don’t wear glasses normally put in contacts by themselves? Isn’t poking yourself in the eyeball on purpose a skill people have to learn?
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