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Glen reviews Mercy Point (UPN)
"The Outer-Rim Circuit Court's judicial order grants me full
access to this woman."
"Kiss *my* Outer Rim, pal!"
Glen here…
"Not for airing, not for review" states a superimposed graphic over the opening moments of my MERCY POINT screener video. A truer sentiment has never been expressed. This show should never be aired, and should never be reviewed.
But in the interest of fair play, I should point out that said graphic was meant to indicate that the episode on the tape is not "final product". As such, some final editing, scoring and visual effects work might still need to be done before the show is ready to accost the airwaves. In other words, what I saw may be different from what actually gets aired when MERCY POINT debuts Tuesday October 6. Problem is, this episode was a complete story…with a beginning…middle…and ending…and as hard as I try to conjure the notion, I simply can not fathom any quality of FX work or scoring or editing that will overshadow the deep-rooted and profoundly fundamental problems plaguing this production.
Before I ever even put this tape into my machine, MERCY POINT had a lot of prejudice to overcome in the public eye. Promos for the series have been getting torn apart on various Internet news groups, where the series has already been dubbed "Deep Space 90210" and "ET E.R." (as it turns out, both assessments are pretty much valid). Putting aside all pre-conceptions - and knowing that many new genre shows are frequently subjected to bouts of harmless poking and prodding before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves - I approached MERCY POINT with as open a mind as I could possibly muster. Boy was that a useless energy expenditure.
MERCY POINT is just plain bad. The kind of bad that makes you resent being alive while you’re watching it. The kind of bad that makes you gasp in wonder, and angrily contemplate the horrific lack of creative and economic savvy which allowed a show like this to be produced. As a comedy, MERCY POINT might find success and a future. The stupidity within it might actually be funny if the cast and writing weren’t so damn serious. But as a "drama", it’s difficult to imagine MERCY POINT finding forgiveness from audiences whose expectations have been raised substantially by the plethora of genre product already in the marketplace.
Mercy Point is a space hospital. BABYLON 5 or DEEP SPACE 9, but with hospital beds and space ambulances. All kinds of freaky folk…both human and alien…come to Mercy Point for treatment of various maladies. One of the first plot lines thrown at us by MERCY POINT involves a pair of feuding nurse / doctor / whatever / sisters. One sister wants the other off the station because she thinks it’s too dangerous for her sibling to be there. It’s high school hallway talk all the way with this one, neither is at all convincing in their argument, we don’t care about either of the characters enough to decide who is right and who is wrong. We just want them to quit bickering and go away.
Just as I came to this realization on my own, my friend Vinyl Boy (who had joined me for an evening of pilot viewing - his code name selected due to his love of old-style records, but the way, and implies nothing kinky) offered his first critical comment of what would be many throughout the night. As the sisters bickered and complained, Vinyl Boy dryly offered: "They’re gonna run that into the ground for the next 26 weeks….if they get them." I can’t quite remember the sequence of events here, but I believe it was at some point during this particular on-screen conversation that the immortal line:
"If that chip on your shoulder was any bigger, it would have it’s own gravitation pull!" was spoken. Might have been somewhere else in the episode - but the line is real, and you get the idea.
Among the many blissful and crack-headed snubbings of science-fiction tenants in MERCY POINT is the notion that these hot-shot space doctors frequently (and apparently blindly) treat alien patients about whom they know very little. One sequence has series lead Joe Morton (who has seen far better days in BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, SPEED, TERMINATOR 2) reaching into a gewy , slimy orifice to search for a creature’s genitalia. He explains that if you squeeze it’s genitalia just right… the creature could vomit all over you. If it vomits, it’s a male. He then, backs away, and sure enough - the hapless alien pukes all over the other doctors. Meaning it’s a male. That’s how you tell what sex the alien creature is! Remember this technique the next time you have a close encounter with the little gray men, although you’d probably start The War of the Worlds if you tried it out.
Of course, what you one expect from a hospital which features energy-wave hand sterilizers (you stick your hand in a little cubby hole…energy zaps over & sterilizes your hands), but still has water faucets which turn off and on manually?
MERCY POINT makes serious runs at legitimacy on more than a few occasions. The presence of John DeLancie as a hospital administrator is an obvious attempt to make STAR TREK fans feel at home in this wacky new setting. DeLancie, in the meantime, looks like he really wants to go home. Also, the "cases" at Mercy Point (I mean the patients on the show, not the show’s creators) are all labeled with recurring graphics on the corner of the screen - as if somehow seeing the stupidity in print will lessen the impact of viewing it firsthand.
For example: one of the main characters gets decapitated. A dolly shot pulling back
down the length of the hall as the medics and interns power forward with the victim is priceless. They’re running along with a headless corpse on a gurney, whose bloody stump of a neck has been plugged off with a futuristic plunger. His head is being carried along side in a pressurized bucket. Right up there with the very best (or worse) of Ed Wood. Cut to the next scene: a case number scrolls across the corner of the screen, followed by the words "Recapitation in progress".
Surgeries are, by the way, lorded over by a holographic head extremely reminiscent of the holo-head from RED DWARF. It’s clearly supposed to be of assistance to the surgeons, but they never really listen to it. It just hangs there in mid-air like some sort of electronic voyeur, yapping medical techno-babble which no one seems to utilize. Presumably, this concept / character will ultimately find a purpose for existing, or be canned altogether (along with the rest of the cast and crew, most likely).
One might think the (predominantly) beautiful people actors who populate this series might have a future on some other project. If they can say lines like these with a straight face, they can do anything. Flatly directed and criminally misconceived from the outset, MERCY POINT is a shining example of what happens when there’s no one around to say "no" to a project. Perhaps The Powers That Be simply did not understand how lousy this project could be (due to lack of familiarity or comfort with the SF genre). Perhaps MERCY POINT is some hellish by-product of studio ass kissing and political maneuvering. Either way, it’s a complete misfire from the outset. And at times, it’s simply embarrassing.
Vinyl Boy called MERCY POINT "a witches brew of space gobbledegoop."
I prefer his second characterization: "a lot of money being poured
into a piss pot that’s just gonna keep stinking." I am told that drastic measures are being taken to salvage this series. Maybe they will be effective. Maybe they will only serve to speed this show along towards a much-needed extinction.
For my money…even with Joe Morton squeezing its balls…MERCY POINT can not possibly be resuscitated. And if it is, what quality of life would it have?
MERCY POINT debuts Tuesday October 6 on UPN. 9pm Eastern, 8pm Central.
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When I first heard the idea for Mercy Point, I thought "Cool! Someone's finally going to try doing Sector General!", the classic series of stories by James White about a hospital station in deep space. With the CGI advances of the last few years, all the ET medical personnel and patients would be easy.
Now I see this review and I know fear... Damn, it could've been great.
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I was only going to watch this show because of the sci-fi elements. I'm not a big fan of medical shows, but I thought that if it was done right, it might be interesting. Glen's review convinced me that it is being done so far from right that there is no point in wasting my time. One less wasted hour next week. Thanks Glen.
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I, too, saw this episode several months ago. The description in next week's TV Guide, though, sounds like a totally different episode: "a mysterious virus is detected in the hospital; an operation in zero gravity; the newly arrived resident has a past involving two of the doctors on the staff".
Sounds like they may have re-filmed the whole thing. I don't recall a zero-g surgery in the pilot I saw. -
It doesn't sound much worse than any given ep of Voyager. And remember, the pilot almost always stinks because until the numbers are in they don't know who to aim for, so there's heaps of compromise. Especially with sci-fi. How many time have the big guns proved they a) have no idea, or b) take three years of scraping by to come to anything decent? There are precious few exceptions to the above, almost none from the networks. Still, I'll give it a chace - even if it is for the... recapitation.
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Sep 29, 1998 4:50:15 AM CDT
Re:Is this the pilot that will air?[more on MERCY from COAXIAL]
by coaxial
Glen here...as I indicated in the article / review, the pilot I saw was not final product, and some rather extensive retooling was being done to try to salvage the show. It is ENTIRELY possible that said retooling has resulted in either a re-shot pilot, or that the mutliple strands of stories which ran through the ep I viewed have been moved to other eps, or disgarded altogether.**Glen**
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This was an obvious train wreck from the very first promos. How many eps will it take before they take the T&A route of Voyager? Then again, even an hour of well-lit shots of sweaty nekkid LA bods every week might not save this... Of course if it went to that plateau, I'd actually watch.
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I must admit that the point of this email is rather trivial, but I thought I'd express some degree of glee at having read this line in the review of "Mercy Point":
>MERCY POINT is just plain bad. >The kind of bad that makes you >resent being alive while you -
I grew up reading James Whites hospital sf books and was really looking forward to this show. Thanks for the heads up. If I'm going to catch it, I'll wait for a few episodes. Hopefully it'll improve.
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My god...UPN producing a terrible show! What next, DS9 entering its' last season?
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The tape Glen reviewed was the UPN presentation, which was totally scrapped and a new pilot was filmed. No one loses his or her head in this one.
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I just read Glens review a moment ago. I had to print it out, 'cause brother it was the funniest review I have ever read. Your reference to the headless body being rolled down the hallway, and the people carrying the head necks to it was bringing tears to my eyes! And how did Joe Morton know what would happen if you squeezed the aliens genitals just right? To funny
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