Don't say no to the Incredible Medicine Show!
Cosmetic surgery gone horribly wrong in the most bloody and gory way possible? And witchcraft? Must be The X-Files.
Actually, this episode seemed entirely pulled from several other episodes, both of this show and others. There were aspects that reminded me of 'Die Hand Die Verletzt', which seems like the most obvious choice since it dealt directly with apparent witchcraft. But there were also elements of 'The Calusari' and 'Syzygy'. And, unfortunately, 'Home', because LOTS AND LOTS OF BLOOD.
Unlike a lot of X-Files episodes, though, this is one where Mulder and Scully solve the case but fail to catch the villain. He just moves on in his new, younger face, at a new hospital, where ten years from now, he'll probably attempt the same thing again. If the show ran 14 seasons, maybe this could be revisited. At least with the knowledge they gained in 'Sanguinarium', as soon as something weird happened at the new hospital, Mulder and Scully could be right on it.
The interesting thing here is that none of the doctors who went overboard in performing their surgeries were the actual villains, nor was Nurse Waite, who happened to turn up in a tub full of blood to apparently surprise Dr Franklin. She was set up by Franklin, presumably trying to take advantages of stereotypes that women, rather than men, practise witchcraft. And unfortunately she was unable to survive Franklin's curse of magically implanting straight pins in her digestive tract, causing her to bleed to death. (I've also seen a theory that she was into witchcraft and was trying to protect the patients and take out Dr Franklin, but ... why hide in a tub of blood, then?)
It also turns out that the doctors who initially appeared to be the villains weren't really the victims, either. Well, they weren't the worse off victims. They were still abused and manipulated by Dr Franklin's magic, they just weren't murdered. Yay?
But there's a pretty huge problem here. At least, I think there is. Well, several problems. For one thing, how is it that the patients that came in just happened to have birthdays that aligned so perfectly with Dr Franklin's plan? Did he also manipulate them into thinking they needed cosmetic surgery? I guess it wouldn't really surprise me if he did, but I don't think the episode made that clear.
The other big issue, besides the conflation of real life ritual magic and ritual human sacrifice, which modern witches don't actually do, is, well, the whole human sacrifice aspect of the whole thing. Why does he need to sacrifice people with those birthdays? Why not sacrifice people on those days? Also, were their only patients people with the right birthdays? It just seems awfully coincidental. To quote River Tam, "'Day' is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It's not applicable."
The one very real thing this episode addressed, and I don't think it's something that anyone could necessarily get away with in real life, is the idea of covering up malpractice to preserve an otherwise profitable business. I know that non-medical businesses do this all the time. To them, everything is about the bottom line, and while they won't necessarily always cover up wrongdoing, they may pay a settlement to avoid a costly court battle and extended bad press, which would surely cost them more than the more immediate and simpler solution.
I believe in reality, though, there's just no way a hospital could manage to cover up four suspicious patient deaths. The AMA would be all over it, for one, and the people involved would lose their licenses and no one reputable would hire them and they wouldn't be able to buy certain equipment and so on. There are SO MANY ways people like the ones Dr Franklin worked with would be held accountable and simply unable to continue in the business that made them all that money. None. Suspension of disbelief ... faltering...
The other thing is, as far as I can tell, Dr Franklin's spell only made him appear young, not achieve immortality, so he was still ageing, right? So what's the point, then? The guy's a plastic surgeon and knows other plastic surgeons. He could probably get actual surgical work done to just look young if that's all it is, rather than performing ritual human sacrifices.
I'm just saying.
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