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 Daily Motion.
Life is getting dark in Boston!
Episode 4.4 “The Naked and the Dead”
(Dir by Leo Penn, originally aired on October 30th, 1985)
This episode opens with Dr. Craig in an even worse mood than usual. There’s two newspapers in Boston and they each have a totally different weather forecast. One says that the day is going to be warm and sunny. The other says to expect rain. How is Dr. Craig supposed to know whether or not take an umbrella to the hospital!? Ellen, meanwhile, is preparing for Stephen’s funeral, which is going to be held later in the day.
Yes, Dr. Craig does go to the hospital on the day of his son’s funeral. He says that he has no choice because his patients need him but it’s obvious that the hospital is his way of avoiding the grief and guilt that he feels over the death of his son. Ellen worries about whether or not Stephen will be buried in a comfortable suit. Dr. Craig yells at a post-op patient for smoking and eating too much. They’re both dealing with their sadness.
Dr. Westphall, meanwhile, deals with his nonstop depression by coming up with new (and impractical) community projects for the hospital. In this episode, he leaves Tommy with a babysitter so that he can try to persuade the Board of Directors to fund his latest project, a clinic devoted to battling malnutrition. The Board turns him down. Westphall returns home a depressed. That’s nothing new. Westphall is always depressed. That said, this was the first episode in which I really felt as if I understood Westphall’s depression. Westphall feels guilty because, for all of his medical training, he still doesn’t understand his son’s autism. So, instead of dealing with Tommy, Westphall throws himself into the hospital. He’s really not that much different from Dr. Craig.
While that’s going on, Bobby hooks up with a physical therapist at the hospital. Nurse Lucy (Jennifer Savidge) steals his scrubs and we get the sight of a half-naked Mark Harmon running through the hospital. Meanwhile, an aspiring teenage photographer (Robert Romanus — DAMONE FROM FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH!) is beaten up when he sells some bad drugs to the other inhabitants of the group home where he lives. The photographer is dead by the end of the episode. It’s just that type of day.
This episode ends with Dr. Craig and his wife going to the funeral. It’s raining, of course.
Wow, what a depressing episode! Fortunately, the strong ensemble cast kept things bearable, even though there wasn’t much happiness to be found over the course of the hour. Still, I worry about Dr. Craig. He really does seem like he’s just a few days away from snapping. Hopefully, he’ll express his grief at some point. It’s not good to hold all that in. We know there’s a bar near the hospital and Dr. Craig seems like he’s on the verge of becoming a regular.
Are things going to continue to get dark or is Boston going to see happier day? We’ll find out next week!
Through the Shattered Lens 