Monday, September 14, 2009

What's cooking, doc?

9:27 AM / Television / CommentsNo Comments

Television

I don't really have much to say about the weekend's opening two-parter for Casualty's twenty-fourth series, which in comparison to the last couple of season premieres really wasn't all that impressive. I will, however, point out that I grudgingly respect any show that has the guts to introduce a new character, billed as a regular and with something approaching three-dimensional characterisation, and then kill them off before the end of their second episode. The unfortunate individual was Georgia Moffett, playing a new junior doctor, Heather, who, called out to attend to an incident at an abandoned shopping centre during her first shift, ended up being engulfed in a fireball and fried to a crisp. It reminded me very much of a certain incident in the first series of Spooks involving a megalomaniac white supremacist, a deep fat fryer and Lisa Faulkner's face. Fun times!

Admittedly, I'd worked out beforehand that this was going to happen - the fact that the BBC posted spoilers for the upcoming Episode 3 (which they hastily revised a couple of days later) explicitly referring to "Heather's death" was a pretty solid clue, methinks - and I'm slightly miffed that, after two years without the death of a single regular character, we've now had two in the space of just over a month. Still, it's nice to see the show doing something slightly ballsy, even if it does mean we're now deprived of the most promising of the four new recruits who joined for the new series.

PS. The writer of the episodes is clearly a fan of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Unfortunately, she was at great pains to point this out at every opportunity, beginning with the episode's title, Dawn of the ED (ED = Emergency Department), and extending to dialogue along the lines of "Hey, this is just like that film Dawn of the Dead!" References, in my experience, tend only to be effective when you leave the viewers to discover them for themselves rather than highlighting them in neon.

 
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