Episode 8 - Choice Cuts

       Nasty!! Great idea, good and thoroughly revolting story (well, the thought of waking up in a hotel bath to find someone had removed fairly essential bits of one's body certainly made me shiver - and it wasn't just from imagining the ice cubes....) - pity it was let down by being too hurried - and by one enormous error.

       Unless I've completely misunderstood everything I ever learned about haematology, there is no such blood group as 'rh positive'. Fundamentally, and without going into too much detail, blood can be divided into four main groups - O (the 'universal donor'), A (my own group), B, and AB - and blood from each of these is either rh (i.e. Rhesus factor) positive or rh negative (rh negative blood, regardless of the type, is very much rarer than rh positive - and the two are incompatible.) How something so glaringly wrong managed to slip through is quite beyond me - in fact, I'm beginning to doubt my own medical knowledge... Somebody reassure me, huh?

       Given that so much of the story hinges on this inaccuracy, the rest was rather spoilt for me. I couldn't believe in Keel as a vagrant - uhuh, no, 'fraid not. And how come it took him so long to pass out after being given the injection?

       It all seemed so easy. Malone and Backup escaped well before the sulphuric acid-loaded sprinkler system started up (nice idea, that, by the way. I assume the sprinklers themselves didn't contain any plastic parts?): Matthew and the doctor were caught with the minimum of hassle - and without the help of Curtis and Keel (they really seemed a bit wasted in this episode...) And while I didn't find the ending too much of an anti-climax - after all, you really can't win 'em all: Bodie and Doyle never did, and I like that touch of realism - I did find it altogether a disappointing and unsatisfactory episode. Perhaps if it had been longer (a two-parter? The sheer nastiness of the story could probably have supported such extravagance) it would have been better: more time to develop the characters, build the tension, and emphasise the bleakness of the conclusion...

Can anyone enlighten me as to why Malone and Backup fired their guns before making their escape? I'm not sure if Sky1 cut a few seconds or if I'm just missing something obvious.