NBC is desperate for content considering production on fall TV series is just starting and the first new episodes won’t be available until October or November. To fill the gap they purchased the rights to Canadian medical drama “Transplant”. On numerous occasions in this blog I’ve asked the question “Do we really need another medical drama?” And with rare exceptions the answer is no. Fortunately our organs are working just fine and we don’t really need a “Transplant”.
The main character is Bashir Hamed, a Syrian refugee who has been accepted to live in Canada under their refugee assistance program. He’s accompanied by his preteen sister Amira. They have transplanted their lives fleeing the Syrian Civil War to live in Canada. The show has nothing to do with medical transplants.
In the opening episode he’s working as a short order cook in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Toronto. Suddenly a semi truck crashes into the front of the restaurant injuring him and 4 other people. He manages to pull himself together and remove some shards of glass from his abdomen and then proceeds to help the other victims. One is a 50 something-year-old woman who is in full cardiac arrest and he beats on her chest and gives her CPR. Another is his friend who I believe owns the restaurant and he’s got blood behind his eyeball so Bashir cuts the corner of his eye socket to relieve the pressure. Then he moves on to a man with a fractured skull and a blown pupil so he gets a power drill and drills a hole into the man’s temple to relieve the pressure. He doesn’t have time to treat his other friend who has a dislocated arm.
The next scene shows him waking up in the ER with all of the other victims after having been transported there. No one knows that he had performed all of these procedures on the victims because the guy with a hole in his head was actually Dr. Jed Bishop the head of the ER at that hospital. They presumed that Dr. Bishop had performed all of the procedures including drilling a hole in his own head.
That’s a pretty exciting and interesting beginning of a TV show but it falls apart quickly after that. Despite the insistence that he stay on the hospital gurney and wait for further treatment, he keeps getting up and wandering around the ER looking for someone. It turns out he’s looking for a friend who was also injured in the accident. We never do quite understand their relationship. I think they are roommates. We do discover that his friend doesn’t have immigration papers. They eventually meet up and he puts the friend’s dislocated shoulder back in place. Then he goes in search of his kid sister who is missing. She has gone to the hospital looking for her brother because she heard about the accident on TV.
The police investigating the crash are trying to determine who is the driver of the truck. Because Bashir is obviously Middle Eastern and is behaving erratically the police become a highly suspicious of him. I get the idea that we are supposed to be sympathetic towards this Syrian refugee who obviously has rad medical skills but is working as a fry cook. We are supposed to be appalled at the idea that they assume he’s some sort of terrorist who deliberately drove the truck into the restaurant.
But it’s hard to be sympathetic towards Bashir when he is behaving so irrationally and suspiciously. If he was an ordinary All-American (or I guess all Canadian in this case) white guy behaving like he was behaving he still would have been a prime suspect. The whole thing just seemed totally irrational.
We get introduced to other ER doctors trying to treat the patients and solve the mysteries. They finally figure out that he is the one who did all of the procedures. He still runs around the place acting suspiciously and drawing attention to himself eventually getting himself handcuffed to a gurney by the police until they can finally find the real driver of the vehicle. Apparently his brakes failed, he jumped from the vehicle and got run over by it. They release Bashir. By then I don’t care anymore.
Dr. Bishop miraculously recovers from his brain bleed and is sitting up in bed shouting orders to residents in a matter of hours which is totally ridiculous. Then he asked that Bashir come in to visit him after hearing the story of how he saved him and the other victims. It turns out that Bashir had applied for a job in the hospital and been turned down by Bishop. Dr. Bishop decides to reinterview him giving him a second chance and that wraps up the pilot episode.
We really don’t learn anything more in that first episode about where or how he got his medical training. From other reviews and a Wikipedia article I’ve learned that he was a trauma doctor during the Syrian Civil War. His credentials aren’t any good in Canada where he has now “transplanted” his life and so he is going to end up serving as an ER resident in the hospital.
Dr. Bishop’s magical recovery shows us that we are not going to get credibly accurate medicine in this series. We only briefly get introduced to the other characters but they already come off as stereotypes. One is the perky young female resident who tries too hard to make a good impression. Another is a driven surgical resident who is out to compete with everyone and has a chip on her shoulder. Bishop is a hard-nosed, grumpy but brilliant doctor who is worshiped like a God by the other personnel in the hospital. By the way Dr. Bishop is the only actor I recognized. He is played by the Scottish actor John Hannah who did a couple of seasons of “Agents of SHIELD” as Holden Radcliffe but I remember him most as the character Batiatus from the
“Spartacus: Blood and Sand” TV series.
Unless you are just desperate for the heartwarming struggles of a Middle Eastern refugee trying to make it in the big bad Western world you would do better to watch Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor,
Chicago Med, or just about any other medical drama on TV. I’m giving it a solid rating of “Skip It“.