Yahoo News ‘Dr. Death’ Season 2 Review: Edgar Ramirez and Mandy Moore in a Half-Effective Tale of Science and Seduction
The story of Peacock’s Dr. Death in its second season is really two stories, which intersect through duplicitous surgeon Paolo Macchiarini (Edgar Ramírez).
In one, a respected journalist (Mandy Moore’s Benita) falls in love with a con man, and then eventually retakes control of her life by taking him down. In the other, doctors grow suspicious of, and then work to stop, a celebrated colleague whose supposedly miraculous procedures are actually killing his patients.
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Late in the season, a skeptical reporter tells Benita that the former narrative is the more interesting one, since it’s simpler, juicier, more relatable. But the show, created by Ashley Michel Hoban, only really comes alive in the latter. Stitched together, the two halves make for a lumpy, if occasionally gripping, whole.
Though he’s the reason we’re all here, Paolo himself remains something of an enigma. The premiere foreshadows his downfall with opening shots of angry protestors and bloody hands as well as, you know, that title. (Dr. Death is a true-crime anthology, so Paolo’s abuses have nothing to do with Dr. Duntsch’s from last season.) But the first proper introduction we get to him is as a savior: a surgeon whose revolutionary “biosynthetic” (basically, plastic) tracheas promise to circumvent the dangers of traditional trachea transplant. It’s enough to land him a prestigious position at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2012, and a fawning TV profile produced by Benita in New York in 2013.
Ramirez deftly modulates his performance as a charismatic guy who always seems to be laying it on ever so slightly too thick — his favorite conversational trick is suggesting a comparison between himself and Jesus, and then humbly demurring when someone states it outright. But Dr. Death keeps him at arm’s length, declining to excavate his psychology or deliver a tidy origin tale. For the most part, the choice plays as a strength. It allows the series to expand its scope beyond the exploits of one monster, and take aim at the failures of an entire system.
The problem is that Dr. Death (based on the Wondery podcast of the same name) is not much better at fleshing out the characters it does want us to understand. Benita, whose ill-fated romance dominates the first half of the eight-hour season, gets the worst of it. The driving question is how a hard-nosed journalist found herself planning a wedding to a man claiming his close personal friend, the Pope, had offered to officiate. (This despite the fact that, as Benita notes, she’s not Catholic and both of them are divorcés.) However, while there are halfhearted explanations — grief, loneliness, something something daddy issues — lackluster chemistry and leaden writing keep us out of what Benita describes as the “fog” of her faithless relationship. What we end up with is not an inside-out examination of how smart people can fool themselves into believing something too good to be true, but a rather less interesting portrait of a naïve person falling for an obvious scammer.
The doctors fare somewhat better in the second half. Leading the charge is Nate, the American surgeon who’s suspicious of Paolo from the moment he likens his new technology to “magic.” If Luke Kirby channels Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight a bit too zealously in big moments, he also imbues smaller moments with enough wry self-awareness to keep Nate relatable. He’s well complemented by Gustaf Hammarsten’s warm performance as researcher Anders, and eventually Ashley Madekwe’s chiller one as Paolo’s protégée Ana. The three of them share a lively chemistry that seems to come from another, more gripping show than whatever Benita’s torrid drama belongs in.
In both plots, characters suffer from the show’s tendency toward cheesy dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism. I groaned out loud when unlucky-in-love Nate is told, “It seems you spent so much of your time working on other people’s hearts that you neglected your own.” One patient witnesses a car crash en route to a surgery we already know is going to be a trainwreck. Still another doodles mermaids so the series can indulge in water imagery to convey her struggle. A tailor can’t so much as sew a wedding dress in this universe without dripping blood on the fabric to remind us that Benita’s nuptials to the titular Dr. Death are doomed.
Still, there’s enough scandal and momentum to hold our attention to the climax. Dr. Death is most compelling when it gets at the dark side of the fundamentally unequal relationship between doctor and patient. The single most charged moment in the couple’s relationship comes not when Benita breaks her strict code of ethics against sleeping with a source, but when she submits to an urgent minor surgery by him in a hotel room. Paolo basks in the adoration of patients gushing that he’s “the only one who gave us hope,” and then vanishes into the ether as their surgeries fail. Meanwhile, Karolinska protects Paolo over patients and other doctors, because he’s the one whose purportedly groundbreaking research can bring in grant money and prizes.
But even well-meaning physicians are not immune to the dynamic. In the single most harrowing hour of the entire season, Nate becomes responsible for Yesim (Alisha Erozer), an initially healthy 20something whose compounding complications necessitate nearly 200 follow-up operations. (No, that’s not a typo.) Her decline is shocking to behold — although Dr. Death is not excessively gory, it also does not pretend that these patients are dying quickly, painlessly or prettily. Almost as distressing, however, is Nate’s parallel spiral of emotional and mental despair. “I started to lose track that she was real,” he recalls some time afterward. “We’re all animals after a while. Body parts. Organs. Meat. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was some kind of butcher.”
Dr. Death is clear that it’s Paolo who’s the butcher, and Nate the hero trying to stop him. But in that admission, we get a flash of how easy the doctor-patient bond can be to exploit, how quickly it can twist into something deadly dangerous. It’s a pity we don’t get more — or, for that matter, that the series barely touches on the media’s concurrent complicity in Paolo’s rise. But as a warning against placing too much faith in miracles performed by saviors, Dr. Death rings clear as a bell.
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