#causualty

OK so first of all i just want to get what the fuCK out the way right at the top because genuinely Stevie what the fuck are you playing at??? This is genuinely the worst example of Stevie just absolutely putting her life into a shredder as a form of self-punishment to cope with bad feelings. What I will say is she does seem to finally be facing up to that a little bit (that I’ve seen) so hopefully this is the beginning of her character development away from that.

Now we can get into the juicy stuff cause I think this is actually a really complicated mess that they’ve found themselves in, and I don’t think it’s really as clean cut as one of them being at fault more or less than the other. I think the power dynamic between her being senior to him is made different by the fact the senior person is her. Let’s not pretend more junior men aren’t treated with the same respect more senior women are on a regular basis and, while that’s not the case here, it’s not really fair to say Stevie has the same systemic power over Matty as if it was gender reversed. Therefore I think the power dynamic is reduced slightly but not removed.

I also think referring to a 25 year old as a child is infantilising and weird. His brain is fully developed, he’s a grown person and, while I think a 25 year old and a 43(?) year old is not a sustainable or healthy age gap, I don’t think it’s inherently exploitative. Where I do think we’re missing some nuance is that I think Matty is very inexperienced in adult work-life and this is something I would regularly see in the medics when I was at uni (and obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone but I more mean as a general observation). Medics often were not kids that had saturday jobs, or jobs at uni or basically anything outside of education and extracurriculars. By the time I got to my post-uni job I’d worked in bars, restaurants and a call centre in both part time and full time capacities. I had created and sustained friendships with coworkers and managers and come to understand how work was different from school. All the medics I knew at uni or even the doctors I know now- being a doctor was their first job. Matty also talks about his dad paying for him to go to medical school which implies his living costs were paid for and therefore reinforces the idea he’s never had a job before this. With this in mind I think my issue with the relationship is that Stevie was expecting Matty to function as an older and more experienced person and was then surprised and annoyed when he acted young and inexperienced (which he is)

This kind of links into my third issue here which is that Matty’s response to Stevie’s mistake was fundamentally childish and she is right to be annoyed with him about it. Stevie may have made a mistake but she made a mistake that was identified, corrected and had no long-lasting impact on the health of her patient. She had recently had significant health issues, took medication prescribed to her by a doctor, had side effects that caused her to make a mistake and then proceeded to stop taking it. If the mistake had been properly flagged at the time she may have had some kind of interventional meeting but I would expect she would have probably just been given a warning or put on some kind of probation for a period of time as this mistake had significant mitigating circumstances. The act of hiding the mistake is fundamentally worse than the mistake itself and, at the time she was informed about it, the mistake had already been hidden. Stevie seems to have been hiding the hiding more than hiding the mistake. Matty’s response to her mistake is like that of a child, who can’t see the nuance of what would actually happen. However I don’t think it’s his age that’s causing him to act like that- I think it’s the fact he’s never worked anywhere before. I know it would likely shake down the way I said above because I have experience in the workplace and have seen those situations shake down before both on the outside and the inside. Matty can’t seem to see the difference in circumstance between he and Kim paralysing someone because they didn’t want to ask for help and Stevie’s mistake despite them being poles apart.

Which swings me back around to my final point which is that Stevie had casual sex with a younger and more inexperienced person and should not be shocked that it became a big deal to him and that he acted as though he was young and inexperienced. I am also big mad with Stevie for not just going to Flynn in about episode 3 and saying ‘OK so after the death of our close personal friend and mentee, Matty and I slept together. It was a really bad decision, I’ve ended things and I want you to be aware so we can try to professionally distance ourselves as much as possible in the short term and i’m telling you this because he tried to cover me missing the morphine in the handover and yeah i think i do need to talk to someone’ and it literally wouldn’t have been that bad.