Medical Drama

We're watching a TV show called Medical Drama. A man in a long white coat strides down a corridor, he's carrying a clipboard. His interns struggle to keep up with him because they are short, because they have not yet grown to be powerful men - the man in the long white coat towers over them. He is looking for someone he can cure today as part of Medical Drama.

We like Medical Drama, it's our favourite show. It's comforting how every illness has a resolution and sometimes there's a moral dilemma wrapped up in jaundice. In this episode of Medical Drama the doctor is somehow not in the hospital he's in a warehouse and he can't get out. He strides across the floor which somehow someone has covered with soap and bananas so that he struggles to keep his footing. This is Medical Drama too, there's something wrong with this episode.

There's an episode of Medical Drama where the patient is deeply concerned because the stitching that holds their body together is coming loose, a sign that they are not entirely human but are instead a cobbled-together mass of organs, a mess that doesn't make sense to the interns who are so early in their career.

Next episode, they’ve brought in a road crash victim and call the man in a long white coat and ask him to fix it. He looks at the body there's not even a head just a mass of battered brains one of the arms is missing, it's pretty much a torso with a right arm, and the nursing staff look at him and say "Well, come on, Doctor."

This is Medical Drama: sometimes they write the script and don't really have an answer they leave the doctor standing there trying to look like he's doing something useful. One time, there was a person who had fallen apart like a jigsaw which isn't even a real condition. This is Medical Drama and most of the episodes these days seem to take place in the warehouse. No clipboard, no interns, just a doctor trying not to fall over, trying to pull himself together.

Background

There’s a long thread by Bitter Karella that was lost in the death of Twitter. The thread described a new form of horror about “a weird ‘otherness’ infecting the world” that “blends elements of bizarro, Kafkaesque absurdism, body horror, and cosmic horror”. After Dan sent me the link I saved it, and I often re-read it. The sort of thing described in the thread is what inspired this piece.

Of course, the real horror is that there was a period in my life when I felt like I had time to watch so many seasons of House.