Episode Report Card Joe R: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bros Slicin' Bros
By Joe R | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 02.23.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So if you figured that the helicopter crash at the end of last week's episode would lead to one night full of harrowing triage, you're actually not correct. Ben, Cole and Plastics manage to pull everyone out of the chopper before it explodes, and everyone looks stable enough to take back to the clinic. It's the next day, dealing with the complications, that turns harrowing. The pilot has a huge metal shard through his gut, which Ben has to saw his way through. During surgery, the pilot blows an artery, and Cole's hands are shaking (from doing heroin? From NOT doing heroin?) too much to pull the shard out, so it's Charlie (who had earlier been yelled at by Plastics to go home) to provide the steady, medically-unlicensed hands.
Mina thinks she's patching up Julio the appendix patient, but actually (and true to TV cliché), it's his seemingly-well wife, Lynn, who turns out to have spinal cord damage. An unsure Mina performs the surgery (again with a shaky-handed Cole), and it's a success; only Lynn also got an aneurysm from a blow to the head, and when that blows, Mina can't save her. It's heartbreaking, and she winds up breaking down in tears on Cole's shoulder.
The only one missing after the crash is Felicia, Clark's little-girl patient with the deadly bug bite. Clark treks into the jungle alone to find her, and the stress on her diseased heart isn't inconsiderable. After falling down a hill, Clark finds the girl, nearly goes into cardiac arrest, and then, when she does get the girl back to the clinic, she has to convince the girls' mother not to give up on treatment just because the iron bird dropped her children from the sky. Oh, and she finally tells Dr. Ben about her heart condition, and he examines her to find that she's in the stages of heart failure. So: bummer.
Finally, Lily spends a lot of time feeling guilty that she was banging Mateo under the waterfall when the plane crashed. She decides that Mateo's outlaw status makes him too complicated to think about dating, but after a talk with Ben, of all people, she decides to follow her gut and visit Mateo on his farm. His farm where he's growing ALL the cocaine plants in Probably South America.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: Clinic robbed. Appendix burst. Cole took Minard (sorry, y'all; I fought the good fight, but this show's insistence on treating everybody like a softball team means we're going all last names) out to his old smack dealer to score something that would keep the patient sedated. While Clark and Keeton loaded the MedEvac chopper up with Julio (appendix), Lynn (wife), Felicia (insect bite with deadly paraside), and Xandra (sister, probably ditto), Brenner and hottie fugitive Mateo did it 'neath the waterfall. And then the MedEvac totally crashed.
Currently, Keeton calls in the emergency, while Clark, Zee, Cole, Plastics, Charlie, and Minard all load up the truck to head out to the crash site. Everybody is admirably calm considering the implications of the crash. After he hangs up, Keeton -- still holding onto some of that condescendingly perturbed attitude from last week -- wonders where the hell Brenner is.
Where Brenner is is afterglowing like a BOSS with Mateo by the waterfall. She invites him to the cantina for a drink, but he's not sure it's good for her to be seen with him, now that he's a wanted man. I'm not the only one who kept thinking we'd find out Mateo was married in this episode, right? They kind of cutely banter until Lily finally looks at her pager and gets the message about the MedEvac.
The rest of the team drives toward the crash site, with Keeton peppering Cole with questions about whether he's using again. Cole is annoyed as hell and denies it. We're spared another spin around this particular merry-go-round when Clark spots the downed chopper. As they disembark, Clark clings fiercely to the belief that everything's going to be fine; after putting those two girls on the plane herself, they kind of have to be. Plastics, meanwhile, orders Charlie to stay in the truck, away from danger but also away from the action. Charlie whines, but come on: who am I gonna side with here? At the chopper, Julio gets pulled out, while Lynn is able to walk away. Xandra tells Clark that her sister was thrown from the helicopter. Finally, the co-pilot is in pain, but he's more worried about the pilot, who he says hasn't spoken yet. He says he's not going anywhere until his buddy is okay, but Zee and Cole say otherwise. When they get to the pilot, Mendez, we see why he hasn't been so chatty, He's alive, but with a giant shard of metal pinning him to the seat. Cole says there's fuel leaking, which means this whole contraption could go up in flames at any time. Mendez orders the doctors to abandon him -- he's already crashed the chopper; he doesn't need three dead doctors on his conscience too. So they leave Mendez in the chopper and head back to the truck; on their way back, the chopper explodes, Mendez dies, and everybody marvels at what a selfless but necessary act that was. EXCEPT NO, because it's TV and everybody's a hero. The doctors are staying.