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“Emily Owens, M.D.” recap (Ep. 8): Picket Fences

Happy New Year, AfterEllen-ers, and happy return of our favorite dead-in-the-water yet-we-still-love-watching show, Emily Owens, M.D. Indeed, after what felt like an eternity of holiday madness and dearth of good TV, the return of uber-nerd Emily and still-so-hot Bandari and flippant-but-loyal Tyra unexpectedly filled me with warm fuzzies, like I was returning to a gang I just started to realize I really liked, even though I knew they’d be gone soon. Sort of like making good friends at the tail-end of your senior year before everyone goes off to college. It’s strange, but you’re still glad it happened.

And the pacing of this episode was so good, full of palpable suspense, peppered with just the right amount of Emily neuroses. We begin by looking at a whole spread of crazy X-rays, all of which look bad and scary. Bandari says that the patient will be “a medical miracle” if they pull through. Then, in a blink, we’re pulled back to two hours prior, where suddenly life seems cheerier as all Emily currently has to worry about is studying for some Intense Intern Exam. As she prances through the halls with her laminated, rainbow colored rolodex of Study Cards Created By Someone With Too Much Time On Their Hands, which is weird since hospital interns aren’t really supposed to have too much time on their hands, she is practically Julie Andrews twirling atop the mountains of Switzerland. Because, like all the cool kids, taking tests is her THING! We learn that Emily’s study cards have been legendary throughout med school and that Will has obviously purloined them many a time and wants to now, setting up yet another competition-for-Will’s-favor between Emily and Cassandra. Cassandra, however, quickly takes the upper hand when she finds an app for that on her phone, which Will decides to take advantage of instead. Emily seems bummed because she’s no longer Will’s go-to “smart friend that makes studying easier,” but what I actually find devastating about this scene is that an act which she has obviously nursed with too much time and care and satisfaction has, once again, been replicated in a less personal but more efficient manner by technology in the blink of an eye. Sometimes I have technology feelings. We then meet one of the secondary patients of the episode, a young woman who is “obviously a model” who may have cancer in her jaw. I have a few problems with this storyline in that everything about it seems too stereotypical. She’s overly full of herself, has a European boyfriend, and says this horrid line when expressing her concern about her face possibly being marred: “That whole beauty is only skin deep thing is really just something that ugly people say to feel better about themselves.” Do people who are over the age of 16 and not part of a mean girls clique ever actually say this? And believe it? I don’t think so. She also then randomly blurts out to Emily how she thinks her boyfriend’s going to propose and she’s soooo excited and obviously Emily will eventually squeeze some more humanity out of her, but right now, whatever. And when are we going to get to that super dramatic storyline from the first five seconds, anyway? The answer is, we’ll get to it now. The interns are all beeped to the ER, where they greet one harried teenage boy who’s just been in a car accident and, while slightly bloody, is running around in a frenzy and seems fine. So we know it can’t be him, because he doesn’t fit the X-rays of the first first five seconds that so wonderfully set up suspense. Then the second ambulance pulls up with the other teenager who was in the car, who was in fact ejected from the car, but found conscious on the scene. They slowly pull her from the ambulance until we see the reveal, in some true classic hospital drama shit: the girl has been totally impaled with a metal fence picket, all the way through. Accordingly, Picket Girl and her picket cannot be moved in any way, and her slow movement from the ambulance through the hospital by a team of doctors is breath-holdingly tense. Things seem to be going smoothly, until they get to the CT machine thing and Emily Owens is somehow the only individual in a room full of people who sees that the picket will not fit. So maintenance comes in and saws half of it off and then we see those X-rays again and then they start into surgery in shifts. Meanwhile, bloodied boyfriend is wandering around the hospital in guilt and panic until he eventually finds Emily and faints on her because duh, something is wrong with him too.

We also witness further evidence of Will being a Big Jerk in that he is a Big Jerk to this kid the whole episode, making him feel worse than he already does about possibly killing his girlfriend. We later will learn, in another bonding-on-the-rooftop scene, that Will’s being overly jerky because he himself got into an accident with his girlfriend when he was a teenager, and his girlfriend did die. This is obviously a horrible story, and makes me feel bad for him, but still, this is at least the second time we’ve seen Will being wildly inappropriate with a patient. And you would think this experience could make him more sympathetic to teenage guilt-wracked kid, instead of just mean. Speaking of mean, Micah is being real cold to Emily ever since his girlfriend clued him in to his own feelings about her at the end of the last episode. I hate this because Micah is my favorite and I don’t like Mean Micah, and while I understand self-preservation and doing what you think is appropriate, I’ve never liked the you-have-to-be-mean-to-someone-you-like idea. It never actually solves the issue and ends up being worse for everyone involved. And Emily righteously does call out how much this all sucks later in the episode. However, his bluntness with Emily does have one positive effect, when she’s complaining about her self-obsessed model patient and he says, well, maybe you can start with not judging her. Aw snap, Micah. The model patient does play a key role in this episode, though, as while Emily waits for the biopsy for her jaw, we get to meet HOT MOLLY. And Hot Molly is the best thing I’ve seen on my TV screen in a long, long time. Hot Molly is apparently a scientist or doctor or someone that mainly spends her time in a lab hovered over microscopes, which is maybe why we haven’t seen her before, but sweet holy hell. When Emily briefly mentions Molly to Tyra later, Tyra mentions that she realllllly likes Hot Molly, obviously, because who wouldn’t, but that Hot Molly already has a hot girlfriend. But, Molly has mentioned that they might be on the rocks. So first of all, Hot Molly is also a lesbian, and second of all, could we finally be seeing the possibility of a romantic interest for Tyra? And please, please, please, will that work out as being Hot Molly? Here’s one more look, just for kicks. In the end, most things wrap up rather neatly: Picket Girl makes it out of surgery okay, somehow, even though the picket had pierced seemingly every major organ in her body. Except it might have affected her spinal cord and she might be paralyzed but then actually she’ll be fine with lots of physical therapy, so, medical miracle, I guess. Boyfriend turns out to have lupus, which means he can have double vision which means the car accident really wasn’t his fault, it was lupus’s. Yay! Model girl decides to check herself out of the hospital and not get the surgery she really needs, opting to try a shaman to get rid of her cancer instead, a decision Emily obviously hates but it’s good to not have everything Emily wants succeed. And we end the episode where we began, in Emily’s happy place, sitting down to take that test. I would make fun of her if I didn’t also sort of love tests and know what she’s talking about. I know, Emily and I are weird.

What did you think of the first episode of 2013? What do you hope we get to see before this series reaches its close?

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