It's been an amazing week of Magic: the Gathering for The Everlasting Dave. Orzhov midrange took me to a 4th place and 2nd place finish at two Game Day tournaments this Saturday, and on Sunday I took it all the way to the title. Ugly-as-sin playmat that I will still use because it says "Champion", ten packs, a foil promo I cashed in for five more packs, and the Nissa Pop Magic figurine I was destined to own. This is all to say I haven't given up on Terrible Television, just that sometimes there are more important things. Like card games. Card games I'm at least kind of good at. But we're back tonight to push past the halfway point of Black Box, just days after its cancellation was announced by ABC. Who's excited? I'm excited.
Episode 7 kicks off with models in sparkly, shimmery, hyper-glam, brightly colored makeup- another modest highlight in a show that desperately needs one. The makeup artist, Frankie, collapses and is our patient this time. Esme and Reagan are at Catherine's place while Josh is at the Knicks game. Catherine mentions she could have gotten him floor seats, cause you know, Mary Sues can do absogoddamnlutely anything their writers want them to do. Little known trivia about Catherine Black: she can breathe underwater, once crab-walked a marathon in under 4 hours, farts a cancer-curing substance that smells like ambrosia, and only dates men who ride white horses and whose armor is stained with the blood of the wicked. All true. Reagan is inexplicably nice all of a sudden, helping to plan Will and Catherine's wedding. Will previews his dance moves again and casually mentions he's about to introduce Catherine to his family. Catherine takes the opportunity to insist repeatedly on Hunter not being invited to the wedding, in the face of passionate opposition from nobody.
Everybody at The Cube is watching the news about refugees in Syria, and Bossman helpfully mentions "The administration does not need another Benghazi." See, doctors are just like us- total fucking morons. Then the models show up with Frankie, and every man in The Cube turns into a babbling waste of oxygen. Oh, wait. The presence of models changed nothing. Catherine examines Frankie, who's suffered a stroke and has had personality changes.
"The color has gone out of my life." -Frankie
OK, spoilee time, because I remember this episode. Frankie's stroke caused colorblindness. Let's get through the final 37 minutes and try to forget the clumsiest foreshadowing in history. Will uses big words to explain to his sous chef that he (Will) has a hyper-developed sense of smell. Again, everyone in the Black Boxiverse has to be the most something of everything. I don't know the people who created and wrote this show but I am absolutely convinced they all have borderline personality disorder. All this mostest and best-ever stuff was tiresome halfway through the first episode, but they keep cramming superlatives into every crevice- and the show is like 90% crevice. Delilah shows up just to be the object of Will's cold rejection.
"Back off please? Your perfume's getting all up in my olfactory holes." -Will
Bickman and Bossman both show up in the imaging lab to awkwardly ask the smug, judgey lady docs if there's any information they can relay to Frankie's model friends. The boys stammer and stutter while deciding who gets to tell the models, and Catherine smirks that they can each deliver a piece of information. Best. Doctor. Ever. In the very next scene, Catherine takes one of Bickman's moves while he and Bossman are playing chess. OK, so maybe the misogyny of the last episode has faded, but its opposite is no less damaging if a goal of our life experience is to become enlightened and good human beings. This show's take on gender dynamics would resonate best with unsupervised third graders at recess. Yes, I'm overthinking it, and yes, that is still the only way this is enjoyable for me.
Anyway, a photographer from the Syria story caught a piece of shrapnel and Bickman is the only neurosurgeon in the whole wide world allowed to operate on her. Of course he is. In the excitement, Bossman tells Catherine that Frankie can't be fixed and she needs to let it go. Uh oh. Did he... Did he just tell The Marco Polo Of The Brain that something can't be done? Damn, Bossman. Your sweater-vests, bow ties, and round glasses belie your livin'-on-the-edge style. Hostage Redgrave makes an appearance just so Catherine can re-establish that she never gives up. The scene ends with Hostage Redgrave shaking her head with an impressed, bordering on awed, smile on her face. Redgrave calls back immediately after the session with a brilliant, groundbreaking way to fix Frankie. Ali Wong has a "synesthesia machine" lying around that translates sound into color, and she reverse engineers it so Frankie can hear color. Because that's a thing that happens. Frankie is not enthused but takes the equipment home with him anyway.
Here's where the people making this show abandon all hope of being original, thought provoking, and in any way significant in the never-ending battle against ignorance that us mentally ill folk try to fight every day. Turns out the photographer has a live round of ammunition lodged in her skull and Catherine is the only one who sees it on the scan. This is a very compelling storyline, and I know because Grey's Anatomy did it eight years ago. Black Box plagiarizes everything about it, right down to the self-destructive female protagonist who refuses to leave the OR at grave risk to herself. The difference is, in Black Box, the extremely sensitive live ordinance has already survived flights from Syria to Germany to New York without giving the photographer a real-life case of the head explodies. Planes don't jostle, right? Also, in Black Box, Bickman gets the shell out and nobody dies. Because Magical Christmas Land.
What better way to celebrate an unrealistic surgery than meeting your fiancée's super-traditional and stereotypical parents? Mama Will collects snow-globes and Stepdaddy Will kind of reminds me of Tio Salamanca from Breaking Bad. In rapid-fire-nails-on-a-chalkboard style, we find out that Mama Will is under the impression that after the wedding, Catherine will give up that silly world's greatest neurologist thing, squirt out a few puppies, and be Will's housewife. I'm not sure if this is more offensive to women or black people. All I know is I'm offended and that takes a lot. Catherine takes a call from Bickman, and Will gets a sext from Delilah. All the while, Mama Will grills Catherine about how devoted she really is to Will and his happiness. Catherine retreats to the living room, watches Leave it to Beaver with Stepdaddy Will, and hallucinates herself as June Cleaver. It's just surreal enough to be sexy when she starts repeating "My husband is quite a catch. He is the sun, and the moon, and the stars." over and over, with increasing levels of distress, until she finally chugs a bottle of vanilla extract. But then again, the things I find sexy are varied and inexplicable. I think this is supposed to be a scary descent-into-madness scene. On the ride home, more lessons on how not to be a couple by the experts:
"Don't forget, you're dropping me off at The Cube." -C
"(Passive aggressive yep)... You had a horrible time tonight." -W
"I didn't."
"You were distracted and disinterested. You must've walked off five times to take phone calls and texts."
"I'm not the only one who took texts during dinner."
Catherine goes back to work, and Will goes back to the restaurant, where he finds Delilah sitting on the bar wearing lingerie. OK, maybe not all the things I find sexy are inexplicable. That shoots up to #1 on the list of greatest Black Box moments. Will's inability to act is on full display as he shuts her down yet again. Frankie sends Catherine a goofy video showing he's using and enjoying the synesthesia machine, because some viewers may have forgotten that Catherine is always right. She goes to the roof to find Bickman.
"(Will's family) is the most kind, lovely, adorable, close-knit family I never had." -Catherine
Haha. Nobody loves you or ever will, Catherine Black. Bickman reveals he lives in a hotel because the only thing he really cares about is being the most bestest brain surgeon there ever was, is, or will be. Catherine's turned on, and Bickman asks her to have a drink with him. It ends before she answers.
In retrospect, this episode was the best of the show's entire run. Sparkly makeup, black and red lingerie, and a hallucination based on "Leave it to Beaver" are the three things I'll remember about this series a year from now. I hope that was the producers' intent.
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