Room 320
- Written by Aurin Squire
Directed by Peter Sollett
Airdate: January 9, 2020
While Kristen and Ben poke at the question of who attacked David, David himself faces a tough recovery in hospital, overseen by someone who doesn't want him to get better.
Tropes
- Battleaxe Nurse: Nurse Linda Bloch comes off sweet at first, but she's a real and deliberate danger to her patients.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Despite his status as a frequent calm and collected voice of reason on the show, Dr. Boggs' reaction when Kristen brings him to the hospital to intervene after having been tipped off that something was wrong by David's efforts to call her is nothing less than barely-constrained rage, forcing Bloch out of the room under the threat of having her license revoked and giving the doctor on staff that comes in to stop them a verbal beatdown, utterly pissed that such a horrific amount of deliberate negligence has occurred because of Bloch without a single member of staff even paying enough attention to stop it.
- Credits Gag: Much like a previous episode that ended on a more ominous note, the liquid of the executive producer card at the end of the episode is colored black instead of its usual white.
- Mind Screw: Considering that the vast majority of the episode is shown through David's POV, who spends almost all of it deliberately drugged out of his mind by Nurse Bloch on heavy-duty painkillers, it is very much a weird one, even by the usual standards of the show.
- Mushroom Samba: Poor David is forced to go through one of these for the vast majority of the episode, due to Nurse Bloch's refusal to stop dosing him with strong painkillers in an effort to make him one of her next victims.
- The Place: Named after the hospital room David is placed in after his attack.
- Psychopomp: David's drugged state at the hands of Nurse Bloch leads to him seeing a monstrous series of these dragging away both an unknown boy and Harlan, his hospital roommate, both terrified and screaming for help, with it heavily implied that she had just killed them both.
- Sickbed Slaying: Nurse Bloch's modus operandi, killing patients that, due to their injuries or underlying conditions, would likely just have their deaths written off as tragic results of such; and if Harlan's terrified ramblings towards David at the start of the episode are of any accuracy (which judging by his subsequent death, and David's own vision of another young black boy crying out for help to avoid being taken by the Bloch-esque psychopomps, probably are), she deliberately targets black patients, knowing full well that due to the ingrained racism within most forms of medical care that she's even less likely to have their deaths questioned.
- Spirit Advisor: Grace Ling appears to David as one of these twice, with it implied that David's drugged state is allowing him to see her much in the same way as his hallucinogens allow him to see God, attempting desperately to give him information while she still can and to keep him from dying before the next nurse arrives on shift.Grace, with grave seriousness: Think of Matthew 13. You have to remember it.
- Vorpal Pillow: If poor David's drugged recollection of Harlan's death is accurate (at the very least, it is confirmed as having legitimately occurred by the shot of Bloch's collection of wristbands at the end of the episode), then this is how Bloch killed him: by smothering him with a pillow in the middle of the night with no one around to notice.
