A Gifted Man

A Gifted Man

Episode 7: In Case of Exposure

By: Carlos Uribe

A Gifted Man is a show about a surgeon who sees the ghost of his ex-wife.

Spoilers Ahoy!

This show doesn't have any cojones. It could have gone dark this episode, it could have had actual drama that explored deep, serious ideas. That would be too much for this show, a show that seems to be trying to do it's best to attract a mainstream audience that is ignoring it. This is so disappointing since that means that the show couldn't fulfill the potential this episode had. If it had, it would have easily been a good hour of television and the second best episode this show has done. It wouldn't have been as great as the pilot, but it sure would be better than the other episodes.

The show's themes is the past coming back to haunt the patients. One such patient is a firewoman. She was in an accident, during a fire, three months ago, and she has mostly recovered. That is until she starts showing symptoms that show she may not have completely recovered: she has trouble finishing her sentences and stutters. One of the possible ideas was that it was PTSD and guilt. She may have saved a lot of kids in the accident three months ago but she left two teachers to die. She left them to save the kids, because she thought she could go back and save the teachers. The show could have gone the powerful route and show the Emo guy save the girl from her guilt. This is A Gifted Man so it turns out that it was mixing two drugs that don't mix, a discovery made by Dr. Holt. It's not this patient that had the potential I talked about earlier. It would have made for a stronger episode, sure, but it wouldn't have solidified the episode's quality.

It was the other patient that presented so many possibilites. A kid comes in all bruised among, claiming it was a skateboard accident. That's a lie as it was actually his father beating him. The father ends up getting injured, and Dr. Holt gets to treat him. It's then that Dr. Holt realizes there may be something wrong with the father. After an MRI, Dr. Holt reveals that this entire time his anger comes from a brain tumor. He offers to remove the tumor, but the man refuses. Dr. Holt lets him go, in handcuffs (the man did beat his kid after all), shocked that someone wouldn't let them enter his head and save his life. At this point it was getting to be all predictable. That is until we learn why the man doesn't want someone to operate on him. It's guilt over what he did some months back, a guilt so strong that he feels like he deserves brain cancer.

What did he do that was so bad? He was in a hit-and-run. He ran over a white woman with red hair as she chased down a ball. At the same time that Dr. Anna died. The show quickly established that the man had killed Dr. Anna. The man quickly accepted treatment at the same time, but all of a sudden Dr. Holt didn't want to, understandably, operate on the man. Here's what the show could have done: have the man think about it, while Dr. Holt processes this information. Have some really moving music and the show would have had a sequence about forgiving oneself and forgiving someone else. The show simply opted with having Dr. Holt trying to overcome his dilemma.

Not to say that Patrick Wilson didn't land every single scene in his dilemma. It was actually being a pretty good episode at this point. Dr. Holt decides to operate (even though it would have been so much better if he had let the man die, for drama reasons, but this is too light of a show) and saves the man. The episode then decides to ruin everything: the man looks at a picture of Anna and states that's not the woman he ran over. Really?

It was going to be stretching it that Dr. Holt would have to save the life of the man who killed the woman he's seeing the ghost of. That is indeed true. But it makes for bad TV to have such a copout, such a terrible ending. It makes everything we just saw irrelevant, and it wasted our times. It's becoming more and more clear that this show simply isn't interested in telling fascinating stories that captivate the audience. This could have been a really good episode. It wasn't.