This week’s episode starts as Thack reunites with an old flame. A lovely young woman wearing a prosthetic nose comes to see him. She and Thack used to date, before she married and before her husband slept with the ‘syphilitic whore’ working in his office. To his credit, Thack barely bats an eye when he sees her and agrees to help her try to repair the gaping hole where her nose used to be. Sure, today a scalding case of syphilis can be cured. Back then your nose rotted off and you needed to have a piece of skin from your arm grafted onto your face; and that was just to make a covering for the hole. Mmmmm, sexy! When he isn’t helping VD-stricken ex-lovers, Thack is elbow deep in dead pigs, trying to perfect a surgical procedure that his unloved colleague, Edwards, not only performed, but wrote about. Too bad for Gallinger he wrote about it in French. Looks like Edwards might be summoned up from his basement clinic sooner than later. It turns out that other hospitals will pay three times as much money for a corpse and it just so happens that the weasel has access to the morgue. He manages to pay off his creditors, and still has enough money left over for both his wife and his whore. In what had to be the most disturbing scene of the night, we learn that the weasel has some kind of weird fetish which involves a hooker pulling off her clothes while trying to rid herself of an imaginary, busy, flea. What in the hell? Tonight’s episode hit two discordant notes; Sister Harriet takes in a baby girl that was left on the steps of the abbey all the while getting threatened by one of the orderlies. Sort of. His threats are vague, as is this arm of the plot, which seems to be floundering around in the dust. I get the nuns have their own style of healing. I just don’t care, and I don’t find the Sister engaging. And then there was the closing scene. See, failure makes Edwards crabby. Crabby enough for another round of fisticuffs. At least I’m pretty sure he got himself into a street brawl; it is hard to tell, what with the camera reverting to “back of the neck cam,” with a filter that reminded me of the shitty resolution I grew up with in the early 1980s. SIGH. Dear Soderbergh, I get this is supposed to be a type of delirium. Could you stop beating me about the head and neck with it? Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
