Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!

This week’s episode was available on neither Hulu nor Prime.  I had to watch a really terrible upload that I found on Daily Motion.  Bleh.

Episode 2.17 “Vanity”

(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on March 7th, 1984)

I was relieved to see that this episode featured Kathy Martin returning to the hospital.  I was seriously worried that Peter White had killed her.  With Peter in jail for attacking Wendy Armstrong, Kathy doesn’t tell anyone that Peter raped her.  From the minute we first see her, it’s clear that Kathy is suffering from severe PTSD.  As a character, Kathy Martin was not always treated well by this show.  During the first season, she was often portrayed as being a caricature, the quirky pathologist who liked to have sex in strange places.  This episode finally allowed Kathy to emerge as a fully-developed character and Barbara Whinnery gave a strong performance in the role.

Peter is in jail.  Despite Wendy’s anger, Dr. Morrison regularly visits him.  Morrison says that Peter is obviously sick and needs help but, at the same time, he hasn’t accepted that Peter is also the Ski Mask Rapist.  (Peter wasn’t wearing his mask when he attacked Wendy.)  As for Peter, he continues to feel sorry for himself.

Dr. Craig is upset when he receives a cop of the documentary about him and he discovers that he comes across like an arrogant martinet.  Dr. Craig threatens to sue the director (played, again, by Michael Richards) though one gets the feeling that Craig is mainly angry because he knows the documentary is true.

Nurse Rosenthal gets reconstructive breast surgery.  Joseph, the construction worker who has been having attacks of blindness, is successfully operated on.  Sometimes, things work out well at the hospital.  Not often, but sometimes.

Finally. Mr. Entertainment (Austin Pendleton) returns, singing to patients and upsetting his supervisor.  (Mr. Entertainment now works as a janitor at the hospital.)  To be honest, the majority of this episode was devoted to Mr. Entertainment and it was a bit too much.  Austin Pendleton is a good actor but Mr. Entertainment is such a cartoonish character that I mentally checked out of his story.

This was an odd episode.  There was a lot to work but it was almost all overshadowed by Mr. Entertainment.  Sometimes, you can tell a writer has fallen so in love with a minor character that they’ve forgotten about what the audience is actually interested in.  The episode felt like an example of that.