The Good Doctor S1E1 thru S1E2
Feb. 5th, 2019 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrixI owe everyone and their brother comments right now, but I'm sick and I slept for two hours and all I want is to sleep again, so I'm watching this show for the bits I missed before I got tossed into the deep end yesterday.
Unsurprisingly, I'm real annoyed by the whole "savant syndrome"--he has genius level abilities! and he's high-functioning!--introduced in the pilot. Special interests are enough to enhance aptitudes, because you get the focus to practice developing large amounts of information and also practice skills, where that's an option (not the case in surgery, exactly, but it reads like Shaun's main special interest is human anatomy and all the flavors and complications thereof. He has the hand-eye coordination, and he's got a whole wealth of knowledge about how bodies work and vary according to context (age, illness, sex, etc), and because of that he seems to be pretty good at improvising to get the body working again when it stops. That's surgery, when you get down to it.
Also, the whole concepts of high-functioning vs. low-functioning and savantism annoys me.
(T has been developing a similarly terrifying body of knowledge as they tackle their nursing degree and haunt the anatomy labs, so they're a particularly fun watching buddy for this sort of thing for me. To be honest, I am probably feeling particularly prickly about the savant thing because, like--the definition seems to be "unexpected talent from someone the assessor does not think is capable of that." Which. AAAGH. Given Shaun's obvious issues with conveying affect and communicating when he's overwhelmed, I'm not surprised someone, somewhere would have given him that label, but that doesn't mean I'm not rolling my eyes.)
So far my feelings about Shaun's Tragic Backstory are neutral shading to "ugh fast forward I don't care," which is not unexpected. There's abuse there, there's a prenaturally sweet and empathetic little brother who dies in a tragic accident, there's a lot of incredibly unrealistic "wait you kids went to live in a BUS? in the 90s? and a doctor and potential mandated reporter saw you run off and did nothing for HOW long?" shit in the background there, too. I am not here for child autistics, dammit, I'm here for adults, and the backstory is typically very sweet and calculated for neurotypical observers, so I'm effectively blowing it off.
But... there's also things like this:
Melendez [supervisor]: "You're not objective!"
Claire [fellow resident]: "Who is?"
and my pendulum tilts right back to love again.
There's a lot to love about Claire Browne, actually, who is occupying the "sympathetic NT who listens to the autistic person" position on the show. She's a fellow resident, a black woman who tends to be the person arguing that doctors ought to listen to their patients. I'm... a little bit mmm at the fact that she's also the person who tends to listen to Shaun and that she's the only woman in the "main" team on the show--the only other two women in the main cast are a legal liasion for the hospital and the chair of the foundation that funds the hospital--which generally has me worrying about her position as the main empathetic discussion on the show.
But she's also capable of being wrong, and she holds people at a little bit of a distance, and the show goes to pains to point out that she is equally brilliant to Shaun--to the point of having their mutual supervisor attribute her ideas to Shaun at one point--so I'm soothed that she gets her own time and three-dimensional personhood in the show. And she is in no way maternal, which is also a point in her favor as a character, while also not apparently being romantically interested in Shaun, which soothes me further. She's an interesting person in her own right.
The thing I am missing most, I think, as I catch up on these episodes, is the total absence of self-awareness and humor on Shaun's part. Maybe that will pop up eventually, but it is something I particularly miss about Community's Abed--the notion that someone on the spectrum might be quite aware of how other people consider them, and find certain things about allistic people funny. It's never quite clear if the moments when Shaun references his autism in his line of reasoning ["You are a very arrogant person. Arrogant people don't bother to lie"] is something he finds funny, and I don't think I've seen him laugh once yet.
Which is fair. It's been a while. But I miss that. I love listening to Deaf humor, too, and like--
people expect disability narratives to be so serious, like our lives are an endless struggle, and never seem once to think about the notion that those lives might influence a sense of humor about things. It's one of the things I loved about the Netflix Daredevil series--for all it was frequently weird about Matt's blindness, he got to crack blind jokes and wrongfoot people and have someone who got him and leaned in on that. I hope we get that for Shaun at some point in this show.
Unsurprisingly, I'm real annoyed by the whole "savant syndrome"--he has genius level abilities! and he's high-functioning!--introduced in the pilot. Special interests are enough to enhance aptitudes, because you get the focus to practice developing large amounts of information and also practice skills, where that's an option (not the case in surgery, exactly, but it reads like Shaun's main special interest is human anatomy and all the flavors and complications thereof. He has the hand-eye coordination, and he's got a whole wealth of knowledge about how bodies work and vary according to context (age, illness, sex, etc), and because of that he seems to be pretty good at improvising to get the body working again when it stops. That's surgery, when you get down to it.
Also, the whole concepts of high-functioning vs. low-functioning and savantism annoys me.
(T has been developing a similarly terrifying body of knowledge as they tackle their nursing degree and haunt the anatomy labs, so they're a particularly fun watching buddy for this sort of thing for me. To be honest, I am probably feeling particularly prickly about the savant thing because, like--the definition seems to be "unexpected talent from someone the assessor does not think is capable of that." Which. AAAGH. Given Shaun's obvious issues with conveying affect and communicating when he's overwhelmed, I'm not surprised someone, somewhere would have given him that label, but that doesn't mean I'm not rolling my eyes.)
So far my feelings about Shaun's Tragic Backstory are neutral shading to "ugh fast forward I don't care," which is not unexpected. There's abuse there, there's a prenaturally sweet and empathetic little brother who dies in a tragic accident, there's a lot of incredibly unrealistic "wait you kids went to live in a BUS? in the 90s? and a doctor and potential mandated reporter saw you run off and did nothing for HOW long?" shit in the background there, too. I am not here for child autistics, dammit, I'm here for adults, and the backstory is typically very sweet and calculated for neurotypical observers, so I'm effectively blowing it off.
But... there's also things like this:
Melendez [supervisor]: "You're not objective!"
Claire [fellow resident]: "Who is?"
and my pendulum tilts right back to love again.
There's a lot to love about Claire Browne, actually, who is occupying the "sympathetic NT who listens to the autistic person" position on the show. She's a fellow resident, a black woman who tends to be the person arguing that doctors ought to listen to their patients. I'm... a little bit mmm at the fact that she's also the person who tends to listen to Shaun and that she's the only woman in the "main" team on the show--the only other two women in the main cast are a legal liasion for the hospital and the chair of the foundation that funds the hospital--which generally has me worrying about her position as the main empathetic discussion on the show.
But she's also capable of being wrong, and she holds people at a little bit of a distance, and the show goes to pains to point out that she is equally brilliant to Shaun--to the point of having their mutual supervisor attribute her ideas to Shaun at one point--so I'm soothed that she gets her own time and three-dimensional personhood in the show. And she is in no way maternal, which is also a point in her favor as a character, while also not apparently being romantically interested in Shaun, which soothes me further. She's an interesting person in her own right.
The thing I am missing most, I think, as I catch up on these episodes, is the total absence of self-awareness and humor on Shaun's part. Maybe that will pop up eventually, but it is something I particularly miss about Community's Abed--the notion that someone on the spectrum might be quite aware of how other people consider them, and find certain things about allistic people funny. It's never quite clear if the moments when Shaun references his autism in his line of reasoning ["You are a very arrogant person. Arrogant people don't bother to lie"] is something he finds funny, and I don't think I've seen him laugh once yet.
Which is fair. It's been a while. But I miss that. I love listening to Deaf humor, too, and like--
people expect disability narratives to be so serious, like our lives are an endless struggle, and never seem once to think about the notion that those lives might influence a sense of humor about things. It's one of the things I loved about the Netflix Daredevil series--for all it was frequently weird about Matt's blindness, he got to crack blind jokes and wrongfoot people and have someone who got him and leaned in on that. I hope we get that for Shaun at some point in this show.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 10:55 pm (UTC)You make me want to watch the show!