45 Dead – As the sixth episode of Five Days at Memorial begins, Dr. Horace Baltz (Robert Pine) talks about the conditions in the hospital in the five days following Katrina. In all his years in medicine, he has never seen anything like it. It wasn’t just the conditions because it wasn’t that simple. He explains that decisions were made that should’ve never been made partly due to those conditions. After archival footage from Katrina, the show goes to Atlanta three days after Hurricane Katrina on September 11, 2005. Arthur ‘Butch’ Schafer (Michael Gaston) goes to the doctor and learns everything is fine. After he gets his car washed, he learns they found some photos under the seats. He drives home, parks, and begins looking through the photos. He goes inside and tells Linda that everything is fine with him. He asks her out to dinner tonight, but she’d rather stay with the family. Butch gets a call from someone who wants to meet. In Baton Rouge, Butch meets with Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. (Philip Craig).

Charles tells him that only horror stories about abuses that took place under the color of authority have been broadcast on television. He’d like to look into what happened since there seems to be a gross dereliction of duty across the board. In particular, he wants to check out what happened at Memorial Medical Center where they found 45 dead bodies. Butch suggests those patients just succumbed considering the conditions. Charles suggests they didn’t. Butch calls the office of the general counsel and explains he is with the Louisiana State Medicaid Fraud Unit. He gets in touch with Jim Bowers who is an attorney in the Tenet general counsel’s office. Jim is asked for a list of all the deceased patients and a copy of their disaster plan. He asks Bitch to send the questions in writing and they’ll respond as soon as they can. Next, Butch meets with Virginia Rider (Molly Hager) at a café. She says she was sorry to hear about Shelly. They briefly talk about Linda and the family before Butch admits he is happy to be at work so he can focus on something.

Virginia says the fraudsters are still out there stealing away a nickel at a time. Butch tells her how the Attorney General has asked him to look into the bodies found at Memorial. He thinks they should look at the conditions since things were pretty horrific at the time. They agree that what the doctors and nurses did was incredible, but Butch says there are some wonky things. He called an attorney at Tenet who gave him the runaround. He faxed Butch back the corporate statement and stuff about the heroic medical workers. He claimed he couldn’t locate any of the medical records Butch had asked for. He did receive from an attorney with LifeCare. The statement says they’re receiving information that the patients that died were administered morphine by physician Dr. Anna Pou at a time when it appeared the patients couldn’t be successfully evacuated. Both say they need to find Pou and it’d be helpful to get the LifeCare patient records.

Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga) goes to lunch with Walker Shaw (Tom Irwin) who invites her to join them at LSU. She would have to spend a few nights a week in Baton Rouge. Anna admits she’d commute to Tennessee if it meant getting back to work. Although Walker offers to give her a couple of months, Anna is ready to go back to work now. Callie Fredericks (Glenda MacInnis) with Tenets meets with some of the staff from Memorial. She thanks them for coming out there to work and joining their call team. They are assigned patients and given calling instruction packets. Callie reminds them to only speak in general terms and never give an opinion because the loved ones are usually angry. Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones) can’t believe nobody from Tenet has done much to contact the family members. Callie wants them to tell the family members the truth that the patients might’ve died due to lack of electricity or high temperatures. Susan calls about Shirley Broussard while Karen (Adepero Oduye) calls another family.

While Susan reads the script, she is asked why the patient wasn’t evacuated ahead of the storm. Anna does an interview saying some of the patients were critically ill and had do not resuscitate orders. She is adamant they did the best they could for the patients and to make them feel comfortable. Butch says she comes off well, but Virginia believes she comes off a little too well since she seems unemotional. Butch believes she is just being professional. He thinks it is nuts that the doctors would intentionally kill the patients. Virginia says Tenet was vague about the medical records so Butch suggests subpoenaing them or threatening to do so. She says they could go to Memorial themselves. As they drive down there, they talk about smoking on planes back in the day. They arrive and Virginia confesses that the pictures don’t do it justice. Butch says it is like getting hit by a truck. The guard outside the hospital refuses to let them in without a warrant and a hazmat suit.

Anna gets a call from Liz Jarvis who calls herself a producer with CNN. Since they learned about the state investigating the deaths, they want to get the medical professionals’ side of the story. Anna calls Susan to ask her if she heard about the investigation, but she hasn’t. CNN is preparing a report on possible euthanasia at the hospital. They want Anna’s side of the story, but she isn’t sure what she should do here. Susan will have someone from Tenet call her. Horace calls Robert to see if he heard the news about his patient Elena Batiste. He reveals he admitted her before the storm as a precaution because she was on electrical equipment. The patient wasn’t in any kind of terminal distress. Horace wants to know who was in charge after he left, but Robert doesn’t seem to know. Anna calls Ewing (W. Earl Brown) who has moved to a hotel in Houston. The state hasn’t contacted him. Although CNN has, Ewing doesn’t want anything to do with those people.

He would talk to Tenet if he was in her situation. He would not talk to those media people because they can make you sound however they want with a couple of edits. Ewing encourages her to hide. Butch meets with Tiana Colburn (Natasha Mumba). They talk about how terrible it is before Butch asks if he can ask her a few questions. She says she is a surgical nurse and did a lot of Anna’s surgeries. Tiana helped for a while until she left in a helicopter when helping one of the neonates. Butch gets excited while recalling seeing her on the news saving that baby. Although she thinks it is what anyone would do, he exclaims it was special. As he gets emotional, he apologizes while explaining his daughter died recently because doctors had overprescribed her medications. At work, Anna gets a call from Steven Campanini who is the communication director for Tenet. She goes to her office to call him back using her landline.

Steve (Jonathan Eliot) and the assistant general counsel Audrey Andrews talk to her. Audrey (Shauna MacDonald) asks Anna to walk them through the events at the hospital from her perspective. She tells them how there was no air conditioning before continuing with more details. By the end, it was just chaos and they were under mandatory evacuation so everyone was scrambling to get out. Audrey wants to zero in on what happened on the fifth and final day. Before they do that, Anna wants to know how they’re going to be providing for her defense if it comes to that. Audrey admits she can’t give her advice regarding her representation because she works for Tenet and none of the doctors. When Audrey advises her to get her own attorney, Anna stops answering questions until she gets representation. She goes to Richard T. Simmons Jr. (Jeffrey Nordling) to get assistance. He warns her that everything she says and does will be observed and picked over. She can’t be talking to anyone about what went on. Even her husband Vince will have to be kept in the dark a little bit.

She insists she did nothing wrong before Richard begins talking about her father who was an excellent doctor. He also says her reputation is excellent. They’re not going to sit back on defense because Richard is going to do something. He promises that he is going to take care of her. Butch meets with Diane Robichaux (Julie Ann Emergy) who thinks the LifeCare lawyers wanted her to talk to him because those deaths weren’t accidental. She mentions how horrible the conditions were. She was called up to a meeting at LifeCare. Susan told her that the plan was to not leave any living patients behind. When she asks about Emmett Everett, she is told to talk to Anna Pou. Diane goes over to Anna to talk to her about Emmett. She tells her that Emmett is conscious and aware, but Anna didn’t know any of them were aware. They discuss the difficulty of moving him and getting him up to the helipad. Diane claims Anna said some of these patients just are not going to survive. Virginia asks if that means Anna was going to euthanize him.

Diane says the word euthanize was never used, but she is fairly certain that is what happened to him in the end. Anna pulled her aside to let her off the hook and accept full responsibility for everything because she didn’t want anyone to worry about losing their license. Diane admits that isn’t what she cared about. They turned the floor over to Pou and the two nurses she had with her. Diane can’t identify the two nurses because she didn’t know them, but she believes in her heart that her patients were killed. As they leave, Butch says she didn’t hear anyone directing patients to be euthanized. He suggests the patients just died given the circumstances. They can’t believe that the staff would kill the patients so they want to talk to more people from LifeCare. After finishing surgery, Anna wakes up Allyson (Lili Connor) to tell her they got it all out. They’re sending the tissue samples to pathology, but she doesn’t think there is any more tumor. Anna goes out to tell her family.

Butch interviews Therese Mendez (Deborah Hay) who was the nurse executive for LifeCare. She is asked about her last day at the hospital. Therese says the whole thing reminded her of The Fall of Saigon. They also question Kristy Johnson (Katie Boland). She remembers having a meeting with Susan who didn’t think the LifeCare patients were going to make it. Kristy thinks they didn’t want to leave patients behind to suffer in a deserted hospital for days before they died. Therese checked on her patients first and most of them looked bad. Kristy tells them how everyone was trying to get out while she helped Angela McManus get onto a boat. Therese claims Anna came over to her to say some of these patients probably aren’t going to survive. She allegedly said the decision has been made to administer lethal doses. Although she listed off the drugs, Therese was so shocked that she can only remember morphine. Kristy heard Therese calling her name before they went to Emmett’s room because Anna was there.

Anna came out and told them there is no way they can get him out. Kristy says she might’ve asked for someone to sedate him, but she isn’t sure if she heard it from Anna or someone else. She remembers Anna telling them the patients were in their care now. When she was leaving, she saw a nervous Anna walking down the hall with two nurses. They did not see her administer drugs to any of the patients. The pharmacist Ken Nakamaru (Jeremiah Oh) is asked if Pou told him what the plan was on the last day. He recalls her saying the patients would be given lethal doses. When he asked what kinds of medications, she showed him vials of morphine and Versed which is a surgical sedative. She also asked for syringes and vials of sterile salt water. They use the water to chase drugs through intravenous catheters into patients’ bloodstreams. He gave her the items. He saw them draw up the drugs into syringes, but not inject the drugs.

Afterwards, he saw Anna come out of one of the rooms and she had put the syringes in a clear plastic waste bag. Then, she asked him to check on the patients and pull the sheets over the ones who had died. He believes the patients were murdered.

 

Five Days At Memorial Review

Although the episode started digging into the investigation and evidence against the medical professionals, it really didn’t hit the right marks compared to the previous episodes. It veered off topic a bit too much until it finally got down to the nitty gritty near the end of the episode. The series is trying too hard to walk a fine line between honoring some of the staff while vilifying others. Butch’s overenthusiastic chat with Tiana was a good example of this since he got no evidence from her and just felt unrealistic.

Many of the heroic nurses and doctors we were introduced to in previous episodes were left out of the parade. The investigation was a bit of a low point after coming from the intense scenes at the hospital, but things could get better as the investigation progresses. In a way, it is hard to wrap my head around the purpose of bringing up this story at this point and pointing the finger at all these people again. Simultaneously, it is unfair that the creators have decided to remove any responsibility for some of the people involved without protecting everyone.

Some character names and appearances have been changed completely including the fact that there was no Ken Nakamaru. It is also strange that some of the figures were left out completely such as Emmett’s nurse who struggled with a narcotics addiction and had her license suspected previously. With so many people to blame and really only one being pinpointed, the series may end up leaving a bad aftertaste because it is hard to shake the feeling that it isn’t a hit piece.

The companies, government, doctors fleeing the hospital, and more things were going on, but the focus is primarily being placed on Anna Pou. Hopefully, these things are explored in the next two episodes. Otherwise, the episode was fine besides some of the over-the-top country accidents. It scores a7 out of 10. Recaps of Five Days At Memorial can be found on Reel Mockery here. Find out how to support us at this link.