Five Days at Memorial (TV Mini Series) Day Four (2022) User Reviews

It's not easy

[slak96u · 9/10 · 21 August 2022]

Heartbreaking and helpless, the episode conveys the tone and feeling of the disaster flawlessly. Honestly, its difficult to watch and completely overwhelming. One of the more disturbing hours of television I've watched this year, and as well as it was done, I'm not sure I would want to watch it again. Fantastic acting by the entire cast.

Life is not easy

[moviesfilmsreviewsinc · 10/10 · 23 September 2022]

Episode 4 of Five Days At Memorial begins with frustrations growing across New Orleans. The government is not doing enough for the community, and it's yet another example of how the poor is squashed in favour of the rich elite. Day four is the beginning of hell. With the power off and heat rising, patients begin dying; a slowly decaying, floating tomb surrounded by water. Those at Memorial Hospital are under the illusion that things will get better but with patients in a dire state around them, the underlying feeling here is of misery. The halfway mark of Five Days At Memorial sees a dramatic shift with our characters, as both Memorial and Lifecare find themselves facing down the barrel of a shotgun loaded with bullets of death. This series has done a fantastic job humanizing this awful disaster and showing the raw, horrific ordeal those at the hospitals had to endure during this tumultuous time. It's also rather telling to see just how lackadaisical the government were around saving people and getting those in New Orleans out. The various characters at the helm of this one are well written, and although we don't see much of Bryant King this week, we do see more of Diane and the ordeal her and the others at Lifecare have had to try and deal with. It's a heartbreaking and sobering episode in many ways, and through Mark's storyline away from the hospital, it's likely to show us how, in the most extreme of circumstances, people come together. Up on the helipad, Richard paces like a caged lion, waiting for rescue. Susan radios for an update, with Richard relaying on to Karen that there's a helicopter approaching. With the elevators out, Karen organizes traffic and as an organized effort, moves a patient downstairs and all the way to the helipad. With the aircon off and the heat suffocating hot, it's touch and go for a while, especially as another patient suffers from heat stroke in the hallway. Communication between Lifecare and Memorial starts to break down too, with Diane in the dark about the evacuation procedures. She hands over a list of 53 patients to Susan but it's hastily discarded with a list of other paperwork in the office. Diane is understandably not happy about that, and urges them to take this seriously. Diane gives an impassioned plea to those outside the hospital, pointing out that people are dying and they're at their wits end. The trouble is, Memorial Hospital is a seco.

A slower episode, but it is setting the scene for E105

[michiganave_p · 10/10 · 21 August 2022]

This episode did seem a little slower, but most of the scenes seem to be a table setter for the next "Episode of Death" as I call it as reading Fink's book first, or the part where the final evacuation orders come down and there is a mortal fate for the immovable patients, and don't forget everyone's pets.

The most important part of this episode seemed to be Vera/Dr. Pau start to lose grip with regards to the "marking patients comfortable" part, which is word for word the real Dr. Pau's defense of her actions during this crisis, and when she started to resist dissent against other doctors and hospital staff on how to make the patients comfortable exactly (i.e. The murder or mercy question). The morphine part is going to be important in the next episode. But still, there was a good mix of genuine compassion of taking good-practice care of the hospital patients in general, and then when she went rouge prescribing morphine with no real consent of the patient or surrounding MD's.

You also saw a lot of blame, and deserved, being put at the feet of Rene Goux (Canadian Character Actor Stephen Bogaert) acting as the top hospital executive for Tenet for not accepting any critical patients and being almost violent towards anyone coming in. This is in addition to the inhumane treatment of their lessee on the seventh floor, Life Care. I was waiting for more of this coming in, as ultimately this disaster was mostly the cause of a lack of procedures on the part of Tenet Healthcare.