The Mob Doctor: Pilot

Look to the left.  That's how I felt watching this show.

Grace Devlin wasted no time in answering one of the burning questions I had after watching The Mob Doctor trailer.  The infamous dead body in the field was the neighborhood drunk.  Then she answers a question no one was asking.  She's touched 237 dead bodies to date.

Immediately after this, Grace is in a back room somewhere, with a man who has a screwdriver stuck in his temple.  We can tell the room isn't clean because there are dogs in cages there.  I gather the injury is from a hardware store robbery gone awry.  After making sure her patient has no brain damage, Grace gives him a chew toy, pulls the screwdriver out and essentially drives away, leaving any residual mess for someone else to clean up.

Grace has been paged back to the hospital and is late for surgery.  Another doctor has scrubbed in for her, but Grace tells her to take a hike, but she can still hand her scalpels if she wants.  Grace starts the procedure of removing a bullet from a young boy.  In the midst of doing that, her boss, Dr. Flanigan, pops his head into the OR to make a snide remark about her being late.  His timing is impeccable.  The patient begins to crash, which I'm sure was in no way related to anyone unnecessarily distracting the surgeon mid-surgery.

Everyone in the OR wants Grace to do one thing, but she decides to ignore everyone and starts to cut the pericardium.  "Not the pericardium!" you might be saying to yourself.  It just goes to show, Grace Devlin plays by her own rules.  It seems to do the trick.

Everyone spends some time speaking very quickly with a lot of medical terms.  I may not know what's going on, but one thing is for sure... these people are doctors.  Don't you forget it.

Grace finds out her mother is in the hospital.  She's brought in a girl Grace used to babysit, Susie, who fainted at their house.  Grace checks up on Susie, who is being attended to by Grace's boyfriend Brett (also a doctor).  Brett tells Grace that Susie's tests show she's pregnant, but that is impossible because he performed a pelvic exam which showed her hymen is in tact.  Something about this doesn't sit right with me!  If only House were still around to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Meanwhile, Grace has another patient, Serevino, who is in the witness protection program.  She has a wacky and unorthodox idea for treatment, which I think involves stopping his heart in segments.  She ponders her approach using a gigantic touch screen to manipulate the image of the heart, and now I'm not sure if I'm watching Iron Man or The Mob Doctor.  Then, Grace gets a note that says "Kill Him."

Grace goes to meet Paul Moretti, who is the mobster she works for on the side.  She tells him she never agreed to kill anyone, but he insists she agreed to do anything to make Moretti call his guys off of her brother's debt.  Serevino is an informant and Moretti isn't going to let him screw up his latest deal.

Back at the hospital, Grace checks on her gunshot patient, and is relieved to find that his hemoglobins are in range, as am I.  The doctor who she kicked out of the OR earlier is Dr. Olivia Watson, and though they appear to be equals, Grace treats her like she's an assistant, and tells Olivia to check the kid's platelets before giving him any treatment.  Olivia thinks this is classic countertransference, and I could not agree more.  CLASSIC.

Brett tells Susie she is pregnant, which I think may be inappropriate because she's only 14.  Susie thinks Brett is an idiot because she hasn't had sex.  Grace speaks to Susie privately, about this time in Star Wars when Luke makes a one in a million shot, something something... "It's called outercourse."  I totally saw where that was going.  Looks like poor Susie is going to lose her swimming scholarship to St. Catherine's next year.

Grace visits her mom at home, but not for the tacos.  She's a doctor who doesn't have time for tacos.  Her brother Nate tells her she should go easy on their mom, even though Grace wasn't really doing anything, but then Grace is all "she's been in remission for years," so consider that bomb dropped.  Nate tells Grace he didn't ask for her help, he had a foolproof system.  For the love of god, will anyone tell us how much this debt was???

Grace then makes a housecall to recently paroled former kingpin Constantine Alexander to give him an insulin shot.  He gives her like, $500 in exchange for one shot.  I think that would be a better way to pay off the debt, because diabetics need a lot of those, and she is making BANK.  And that's not illegal at all.

At the hospital, Brett tells Grace that Susie's pregnancy isn't viable.  It's a ruptured ectopic, so he's going to get her father's consent to do the surgery I guess.... I get confused at this point because Grace gets all up in arms, and blabbers about losing the swimming scholarship, which I don't understand why Susie will lose the scholarship if she has the surgery... and what is the alternative?

Then, Grace's gunshot patient dies, and right away she's all "Olivia, you didn't check the platelets!!"  Olivia tells her that Dr. Flanigan, aka the guy who likes to interrupt surgeries overruled her and said, don't even think about checking those platelets.  Grace decides one good turn deserves another, and pages Dr. Flanigan to Operating Room 2 so she can tattle on him to Dr. White, while Dr. White is about to perform surgery.  What is wrong with these people?  She tells Dr. White that if he doesn't open an investigation on Dr. Flanigan, she's off the Serevino case.  Somehow he cares, so he tells Dr. Flanigan to take the weekend off.  Really, the whole weekend???  Gee whiz.  "This isn't over," Dr. Flanigan says to Grace ominously.  Clearly, she has made an enemy, in addition to the two or three other enemies she made this episode.

Against Brett's wishes, and the wishes of the law, Grace lies to Susie's dad and tells him she has an ovarian cyst.  Brett is pissed off because that's illegal, but what does Grace care?  It's the least she's broken the law so far today.

Moretti sets up the Serevino surgery so Grace can kill him using the marked syringe.  She's distraught about it.  One of his goons waits outside the operating room to make sure she goes through with it.  Grace accidentally-on-purpose drops the syringe and it shatters.  "Uh oh, spill on aisle 5," someone says, as though no one has ever dropped anything before.  At the end of the day, the operation was textbook.  Serevino lives.

Olivia is pissed at Grace because she told her not to report Flanigan, and now Flanigan blames Olivia for being reported.  Olivia says no one wants to work with a rat like Grace.  Brett is pissed at her as well.

Grace gets a call from her mother, but when she answers the phone, it's Moretti on the other end.  Grace rushes home and sees Moretti has her mother, and is armed.  Thinking quickly, she jumps in her car and begins wildly backing into his car.  We know it's his car because of the vanity plates.

The best idea, I think, if you're in the mob, is to own a flashy car with your last name as the vanity plates.  "Mor3tti."

Anyhoo, Grace drives straight to Constantine Alexander's house with Moretti hot on her tail.  Alexander tells him to back off, and just as Moretti is saying that no one is scared of Alexander anymore, Alexander shoots him in the heart.  Alexander tells Grace she didn't see nothin.  Problem solved, I guess.

As it turns out, Alexander has really been after Moretti's job this whole time, and Grace brought everything to a head much quicker than it was supposed to.  Alexander tells her she knows too much and she needs to get out of Chicago.  She says she can't leave because of her family.  Alexander tells her to remember that he gave her the choice.  But now he'll be collecting the debt she owed Moretti.

Grace sees a white car on the lawn, and now we're back to her childhood.  Grace reveals the dead drunk at the beginning was actually her father.  A young Grace sees the same white car that we just saw on Alexander's lawn, suggesting that he's the one who killed Grace's father, and that he kept the same car for nearly 30 years.

And that was the pilot!  Anything I missed?  I thought it was too much plot and too much characters too soon, hard to keep up.  I wish they could have found another way to introduce Brett without that ridiculous Susie plotline.  What did you all think?

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Picture Credit: Fox