Evil: Room 320

"How do you know if you’re being killed or not?"

Evil embraces the 'Spooky Hospital' trope but manages to come up with its own interesting spin on the situation.

Before we begin, to be absolutely clear – do not, under any circumstance, pull out your own IV.


There's a reason that episodes featuring a lead character in the hospital are one of the genre standards. The entire experience of being hospitalized is intrinsically unnerving. Everything is out of your control. You feel vulnerable and alone. And depending on why you've been admitted, you've probably got a healthy level of anxiety about your health. Even if you've never been hospitalized personally, we all fundamentally get why the experience is traumatic.

For what it's worth, I should probably acknowledge that I haven't ever been hospitalized. If any of you have been and I'm misreading the situation, I'd love to be educated about it in the comments.

My point being, there's a reason that this episode and Buffy's 'Killed by Death' exist, and they're certainly not the only examples of television tapping into what I might describe as a primal discomfort with the thought of being alone in a hospital room. I might make a vague handwave at this stage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but I feel like you get my point. Take one dash of understandable nervousness at being completely at the mercy of the medical staff taking care of you and add just a splash of, 'Yeah... but what if they were more in the mood to hurt you instead...'. Bake until dramatically satisfying.

So, we begin with the arrival of Kristen and Ben at the hospital, skipping over all the logistics of them being alerted to David's attack and just getting on with things. This is a great choice for the show and had the bonus effect of making me realize how conditioned we are to hearing the elevator 'ding' in TV and movies and immediately understanding it to mean 'We have just arrived and the story begins here.'

But by far the best choice that this episode made was its commitment to being as unclear as possible as to what exactly was actually happening, what was real, what was hallucination, and what was true. We even got a couple of lines of dialogue thrown in to underscore the point that this was a deliberate choice. Not everything that's true is real. Everything is real. Is this really happening? They clearly knew what they were doing regarding the reliability of the narrative and it worked.

To illustrate what I mean, let's take a look at the untimely fate of Harlan Zephyrs. We start with playful little narrative games about whether or not he has legs, which encourages us to distrust any information from or about him. And ultimately, we're left with the strong indication, if not outright confirmation, that he was murdered by Nurse Bloch when we see the close up of his wrist band in her locker. But when did she do that? Did she actually smother him, like David believed he saw? Was he actually wheeled out by lizard men orderlies and a priest? We just don't know. And we're not supposed to, because ultimately the details don't matter. Harlan was killed (probably) by Nurse Bloch for her own amusement. That's all we need to know.

All of the drug trip imagery was similarly well handled here. The 'count down from five' gag was fun and not over-used. I'm a big fan of the gag where they cut between what the person on drugs thinks they're saying and what they actually sound like to the rest of the people in the room. It added a nice underscore to the general theme of 'don't trust that anything you're seeing is actually happening.'

Another big positive of the episode was the way they built on Kristen's unflinching willingness to call in favors from powerful friends in a pinch. They established it nicely when she made the call to get Detective McUseless booted off of the case in favor of bringing in Detective Mira Byrd. And as a side note, I loved seeing Mira back. I was afraid that Kristen had burned their friendship a few episodes back and was very glad to be wrong about that. But what the call to bring in Det. Mira was really doing was setting us up for the ultimate resolution, with Kristen finally calling in Dr. Kurt and getting Nurse Bloch comprehensively shut down.

I do feel obligated to say, I'm not generally a huge fan of the 'straight white man gets called in to save the day by mentioning that he plays golf with your boss' trope, but they earned it here by having Nurse Bloch be so insufferably smug that watching her get marched behind the woodshed was too satisfying not to enjoy.

If anything lets this episode down, it's that the B-plot feels a little unsatisfying and too tidy. It turns out that the man who attacked David was from a case that occurred pre-Kristen. And that on its own is fine. If for no other reason than that it introduced us to Judy, and Judy is awesome. The moment when she and Kristen lapsed into psychotherapy speak and completely left Ben behind in the conversation, honestly, I could have watched that all day. I'm not completely sure, but if memory serves, we never see Judy again and that makes me sad.

But having the mystery of David's attacker turn out to be 'just some guy from a previous case, on drugs' was a little disappointing. And then they add to it that he was also the mystery man behind Rose390, and the spooky ghost game, and it all just feels too tidy and unengaging. I appreciate that we'd reached the point in the season where they needed to start tidying things up, but I would have been okay with the identity of Rose390 staying a mystery. Ah well. As flaws go, it's a reasonably forgivable one.

Bits and Pieces:

-- I looked it up, and apparently the drug Flakka is a real thing. At some point, my internet search history is going to be a significant source of trouble for me.

-- OK, I realize that this is television, and the red blood splatter on Nurse Bloch's squeaky white shoes was a striking visual, but in the real world, all blood is treated as infected under all circumstances. She wouldn't have been casual about it being on her shoe, and they certainly wouldn't have left a biohazard smear of it on the floor of David's room for Kristen to find later. I may not have ever been admitted, but I have spent a hell of a lot of time in hospitals. Also, nurses generally all wear crocs.

-- The rubber ball bouncing down the hospital hallway was very pleasingly Nightmare on Elm Street-esque.

-- It's nice to see Grace Ling again, but I have honestly no idea what any of that about sowing weeds in the grain from the book of Matthew was about. It did set up a very nice misdirect for Nurse Bloch when she thought Kristen had a note from David, however. So that's nice.

-- I feel like there was a version of this script earlier on that leaned far more into the disproportionate percentage of negative outcomes among people of color in US hospitals and they dialed it back. Quite possibly because they already talked about that a bit back in '177 Minutes.'

-- It wasn't until I was looking up something for this episode that I discovered that Mira is played by Kristen Connolly, aka Dana from Cabin in the Woods. I can't believe I didn't recognize her.

-- I get that extras are expensive, but it makes me crazy how empty hospitals always are on TV shows and movies. Yeah, it adds to the sense of vulnerability, I get that. But still.

-- One of the actors in this episode is credited as 'Ghoul Orderly #1.' That's a thing on his resume forever now.

-- No Leland this week. I wonder what Michael Emerson's contract was specifically for.

Seriously. Do NOT mess with your IV

Quotes:

Myra: "This is the priest? From your house?"

Myra: "Description?"
Ben: "Tall. Caucasian. Looked like, you know, a bad gym teacher."

Kristen: "Who’s Judy?"
Ben: "Oh, she was you... before you."

Nurse Bloch: "Good thing you’re not German. I would think you were just saying no."

Grace: "David, you have to remember Matthew 13."
David: "Why?"

Ben: "You’re meditating."
Judy: "I’m observing the universe."

Ben: "Judy. You’re being a bitch."

David: "I don’t understand. Is she real or is she not?"
Harlan: "Everything is real."

David: "Is this real?"
Grace: "No."

Judy: "Use Ruth."
Ben: "Ruth? What am I, an East Village lesbian?"

Kristen: "You made a mistake."
Nurse Bloch: "And what’s that?"
Kristen: "David didn’t have to tell me anything. You following me? Told me everything."

A solid episode that leans way into 'vulnerable at the evil hospital' territory to reasonably satisfactory results, only slightly let down by a disappointing B-story. But seriously. Do not pull out your IV.

Three out of five Ghoul Orderlies.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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