A Gifted Man

A Gifted Man

Episode 14: In Case of Co-Dependents

By: Carlos Uribe

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

Spoilers Ahoy!

This week the medical cases are actually interesting! A big and famous singer, Shawnee, comes in to Holt Neuro with numerous symptoms. She has a big headache, muscle fatigue, and skin sensitivity amongst other things. She's been in rehab before so at first Rita thinks it's alcohol poisoning. Dr. Holt is inclined to believe Rita until he learns that Shawnee has been sober for sixth months. The tests maybe confirmed this since Dr. Holt seemed to take her at her word. It did turn out that she was taking drugs, but Shawnee claimed it was only after the symptoms had started to show up. Stress is also considered to be causing the symptoms but for some reason it's dismissed. What made this actually interesting is that it was connected to the clinic patient.

The clinic patient is a little girl. She has most of the symptoms that Shawnee has and she is also seeing the ghost of her dead grandmother. The series makes the connection early on in the series when both of them are seen describing their symptoms in a nicely edited montage sequence. It would have been even better if the series had continued to place connections throughout the episode, but it isn't until the cause is found that the series bothers to connect them again. It isn't until Dr. Holt is made aware of the girl's symptoms that he manages to tie together and cure Shawnee and the little girl. It turns out that both of them were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. Shawnee's furnace was leaking CO2. It turns out that the girl and her mother were both squatting in Shawnee's brownstone basement after Shawnee had fired the girl's mother as her maid. Okay, so the series didn't really do a good job in placing their connection. It was interesting to see how it got to the connection though.

Once again, Dr. Holt saves the day. It might have taken him the whole episode to diagnose Shawnee, but he didn't need any help doing it. It was the clinic who called on him to help diagnose the girl. Holt Neuro also happens to be have an oxygen tank that saves both of them and also the mother (she was also poisoned but she was a bonus patient.) They don't even have to go to the hospital! It had a cheesy ending with the girl's mother being rehired as a maid or something. Oh wait, there was yet another patient of the week that only Dr. Holt was able to save. Who was it? It was Anton, who was acting out of character this week.

He's being aggressive. It was kind of hard to buy Pablo Schreiber as aggressive, but that's more of a problem with delivery than with the writing. It turns out that ever since getting shot, he has been under the belief that his arm isn't his own. He thinks it has something to do with the spiritual energy inside him. When Dr. Holt finally gets a look at Anton, he explains that it's a rare neurological problem where one dispossess a limb. It turns out that the medical answer to this is to put cold water in the left ear. So all of this could have been solved if Anton had taken a cold bath. Dr. Holt didn't just save a little girl, the girl's mother, a famous singer, but also a series regular.

Overall, this was the best episode this show has done in a long time. It was disappointing that Anna didn't appear until the end. There was also a scene at the beginning where Kate is talking with her soon to be ex-husband that was possibly the worst acted scene this show has ever done. This episode pushed Dr. Kate and Dr. Holt together so if anyone is a fan of that pairing, they are probably happy that Dr. Kate's marriage is crumbling. This may have been the best episode the show has done since the pilot but it's a farcry from the pilot's quality or from what the promise that the pilot had. This was the first time since the second or the third episode where I didn't hate watching this show, so good for it.