Mercy – “I Have a Date” and “I Did Kill You, Didn’t I?”
“God said the doomed lose the right to be redeemed.”
Jacob looks way different.
Oh yes, we’re going to talk about Mercy.
TVByTheNumbers calls this show (along with Trauma) a ratings sinkhole. Even with NBC’s desperate need to fill the holes in its schedule, for all intents and purposes, it can’t in good conscience keep a show no one is watching. I watch a lot of TV and I count on one hand the times I’ve caught even a piece of an episode. In fact, the only two full episodes I’ve watched are the two most recent (though I’ve seen several episodes 30 minutes in). But I think I have a pretty decent snapshot of the show.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I had this series pegged for early cancellation from the beginning. Everything from the preview trailers showing Veronica shouting “I’m a nurse that knows more than all of your residents combined” to the cartoonish Dr Dan Harris (seriously, he belongs somewhere on Scrubs) made me believe no one would care. But the small glimmer of hope I held was that they would focus on Veronica’s PTSD. Every indication from advertising showed her struggle with the effects of war and her ravaged psyche and emotions. But I hadn’t seen anything that supported that hope outside of a few irrational moves (dropping a cinderblock on a Harris’s windshield) and her being overly emotional.
What I was expecting was the kind of hallucinations and erratic behavior demonstrated by Gregory House. I wanted a pain we could see and a woman wrestling with herself demonstrated creatively. Perhaps that was my error, taking the standards of one show and demanding it exist in another, despite different disorders and symptoms entirely. “I Have a Date” would show me something else.
- March 7, 2010
- Nick
- Episode Review
- Mercy