Nip/Tuck: Not Quite the Bomb
Dylan Walsh by Michael Becker/FX
There are still moments, fleeting though they are, that remind me what I used to enjoy about
Nip/Tuck, back before it became a burlesqued send-up of itself. A few of these moments were on display Tuesday night in the haunting storyline involving Sean (Dylan Walsh, in top form) and Rachel, the grotesquely scarred victim of a Palestinian suicide bomber. Rachel is one of this show's few unironic heroic figures, helping Matt get through his injuries after the meth-lab explosion. Her dilemma this week was classic
Nip/Tuck. In an exam to help get to the root of her lingering "exquisite" pain, it is discovered that parts of the suicide bomber have been embedded into her flesh. "Human shrapnel," Sean calls it. Ugh, and wow.
As they head toward surgery, Sean is visited by the ghost of the bomber, a reflection of his own repressed rage and pain over the betrayal of Julia's resumed affair with Christian. Sean's inner demons gnaw away at him until he ultimately explodes in a fistfight with Christian in the operating room. Ultimately, after helping Rachel reconcile with the family of the bomber, Sean realizes that forgiving the unforgivable is the only way out. Yes, all of this is a little on-the-nose, not unlike the way the cases on
Grey's Anatomy tend to reflect the romantic crisis of the week or the way the ghosts of the dead often commented on the family angst on
Six Feet Under.
But by
Nip/Tuck's increasingly crass standards, this was more psychologically provocative than the show has allowed itself to be in ages. Too bad too much of the episode was wasted with the reintroduction of the vulgar Dawn Budge and the prissy Freddy Prune, played with no cliché left unexposed by Rosie O'Donnell and Oliver Platt, respectively. Even that campy subplot, in which Dawn's face was run over by a lesbian on a motorcycle (the old dykes-on-bikes joke) during a gay pride parade, tried to tap into the theme of the week, as Liz confronted Freddy to help him face up to his inner (and now outer) queen: "Aren't you sick of holding it all in? Don't you want to blow it sky-high?" Which led to lifelong fag-hag Dawn forgiving Freddy, but not before slapping him off the bed.
Wish someone would take TNT to those characters. Now I no longer even look forward to the scenes at the fictional "Hearts & Scalpels" show-within-a-show, which seemed so promising at the start of the season. Like nearly everything else on
Nip/Tuck these days, the satire may as well be delivered by sledgehammer.
No amount of reconstructive surgery can restore this show to its former darkly compelling glory.
