my messy reblog blog

The more political Casualty is and the more realistically busy and crowded they make the hospital, the better, if you ask me. This episode reminded me a lot of many of the early episodes of this series, which I also loved.

I felt like recent episodes were drifting away a bit from the current series’ theme (well, it’s basically always a theme of the show, as it should be, but it’s especially been a theme in series 37 I think) of the NHS crisis and falling back too much on interpersonal staff drama - not that plenty of those storylines haven’t been issue-based stories worth telling (e.g. Rash struggling to balance his caring duties to Ashok with his job, or Marcus’s coercive control of Stevie), but I was hoping for the show to get back to the NHS crisis theme eventually and so this episode very much pleased me. (…That was a run-on sentence, lol.) I’m surprised I haven’t seen people whining about the episode being too political yet, that tends to happen with episodes like these. (I don’t know what people who say that stuff expect from Casualty…)

Tonight’s episode was really powerful and impactful. I loved how they showed how the nurses are being affected - Jacob is trying his best and has no other choice because they just don’t have the funding or staff to run the department properly, but the likes of Marty or Robyn are suffering for it too: they’re exhausted, overworked, and don’t have time to care for their patients and help them like they should. (To the point of David having to take his patient into the staff room to give her some peace and quiet.) It’s also thematically sort of setting up for what Jon Sen said the next big story arc will be - a group of new nurses arriving and struggling with working in the current environment of an NHS emergency department.

I wonder if maybe this will be leading to a mental health crisis of some sort for Jacob, as well. Between the Marcus/Stevie/Eloise thing (which must have brought up his trauma from Tina) and all of this, especially if it leads to Robyn dying, I could see him having some sort of crisis or breakdown.

The last scene would have been more impactful if they hadn’t already given away the plot twist in synopses for the next episode. Oh well.

I can’t tell if Robyn’s going to live or die. I feel like they’re building up to her dying, but maybe they’re playing with us and she’ll live?? I can’t figure out which way I’d prefer the story to go, either. I mean, obviously I don’t want poor Charlotte to be orphaned. That would be a tremendously sad watch.

But the description for the next episode says there aren’t enough staff to treat Robyn, and… well, to kill off a main character as a result of the lack of funding and staff would be a very bold move and make a very powerful statement from the show. To go for “Robyn could have lived if we had the resources to treat her”. We’ve seen patients on the show die for those reasons, but I don’t think they’ve ever killed a main character that way (Noel’s death was sort of in a similar vein though, though personally I don’t think they wrote that very well, and the lack of any aftermath made it worse).

The Faith/Iain thing really dragged down an otherwise great episode. I hate Faith and Iain bores me. They have no chemistry and their kiss was cringeworthy. Why is Faith even still on the show? The same show that preaches about calling out abusive relationships with storylines like Jacob/Tina and Stevie/Marcus, doesn’t seem to care about how Faith treated Lev. I want her to be written out already.

Though I don’t like Iain, he still deserves better than Faith. Can you imagine how awful she’d be if she found out about his history of mental health issues? :/

Although it was a small scene, I thought David going in to hug Dylan, Dylan saying no, and David respecting that was really sweet. I love their friendship, I’m gonna miss it so much when David leaves the show.

I also liked Marty’s storyline with the young trans man. I don’t have a lot to say about it, I just thought it was nice.

Every middle aged or older woman: I want that specific doctor please

they just see him and go oh he's so babygirl, the new love of my life fr, and he's just like uhm, okay?

It's definitely making me think that something came up really suddenly at home for George Rainsford and he decided to leave really quickly because of that, because he did say in that HDA interview that his reason for leaving was because he was going back and forth a lot and needed to be around at home more, and that would explain the lack of a proper exit storyline and the lack of screen time, if he was barely there for filming. But then it must have only been something short-term because otherwise he wouldn't have joined a touring production surely??