Cinemax’s Femme Fatales: 102 – Bad Medicine

The 2nd episode of Femme Fatales, titled Bad Medicine, moved out of the prison and into a hospital. The resident hottie this week was Violet Macready (Christine Donlon), a timid nurse who was sleeping with the hospital’s lead surgeon. The show opened with some ‘anniversary sex’ as Violet and her man do some role-playing. For those who complained the first episode took too long to get to the goods, they wasted no time this week. Gratuitous sex seems as though it will be a major staple throughout the life of the show.

As Violet goes to work on the graveyard shift she hates, she gets called to the ER to help with a violent patient played by Robert LaSardo, whom you might know from his run in the first season of Nip/Tuck, or as part of the greatest street gang of all time in Short Circuit 2.

Femme Fatales - Robert Lasardo

LaSardo plays ‘Laz Swan’, a member of a gang who has been stabbed. When some of the opposing gangsters show up at the same hospital he takes it upon himself to finish the fight.

Later Violet talks to another nurse who may look familiar…LILITH! I’m hoping this cameo becomes a weekly thing. It’s fun to see Lilith interact with the characters in her own stories…

Femme Fatales - Nurse Lilith

After their chat Violet goes to see the boss about getting off the midnight shift, but finds her boyfriend there, in a compromising position. After this Violet runs out of the room to see Swan kill both of the other scumbags, and then he decides he needs a hostage to guide him out of the hospital. Violet is the lucky winner.

Before leaving the premises, Swan decides it’d be a waste if he didn’t score some narcotics first. He breaks into the drug storage room where he encounters Violet’s cowardly ex hiding there. Just as it appears Swan will kill the Doctor, Violet drugs him. Swan vows revenge on the nurse, but she has other plans.

Violet pays another visit to her boss and demands a transfer to the prison hospital, which for some reason is in her power to grant. Swan awakens to again find himself drugged and in trouble. Violet is a changed woman and won’t tolerate threats. Swan learns this with a scalpel to his junk. She’s not done there though. Showing up at the doctor’s place and drugging him as well, the show ends with Violet defibrillating his nuts.

Femme Fatales - Nurse
Christine Donlon

Better quality than the first episode, but not as long. I give it 4.5 Bears.

4 thoughts on “Cinemax’s Femme Fatales: 102 – Bad Medicine”

  1. Tanit Phoenix is amazing, I watch this show just for her. The makers of the series should start giving her a bigger part, not just as the host. She really needs her own show. I would tune in to watch Tanit any day of the week. So beautiful.

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  2. The problem with this episode is that it continues with a familiar formulaic vein where the male characters are written to be basic one dimensional feminist stereotypes of men in general. Of course we know that at some point the male character will be pronounced evil, because the assumption is men in general have no redeeming value or qualities. Therefore the female protagonist can be justified in her sadistic sexual torture of the male character.And as in all stories of the type only men are forced to suffer the consequences of contrived bad act, while the female characters escape any and all retribution for their own questionable actions. Why is it always accepted for female characters to indulge in male genital torture of mutilation and that’s justified, but if a male character does it, its tantamount to encouraging sexual violence towards women? Femme fatales overriding message is that only men should be suffer at a woman’s hands because in the worldview proposing empowerment, no woman is imagined capable of deserving comeuppance at the hands of a man. Indeed the formula is obvious, if there’s going to be a sexual theme to the show, there has to be a notion that the women are not perceived as mere sex objects, and to accommodate this line of thinking it is necessary to have antagonistic themes of empowerment exclusively against male characters. Feminist obviously like this sort of thing, and the excessive levels of misandry which characterizes the series helps perpetuate a current social myth that men are universally dumb sexually inadequate, stupid, clumsy socially inept and incapable of making mature and thoughtful decisions. And while this is not to say such behavior is completely absent from some men, female characters are portrayed in this series to exhibit only traits of moral perfection or at the least when flawed will suffer no adverse consequence for such flaws. I tried to watch the episode and since I’m not some mindless frat boy, I simply wasn’t turned on by the constant negative depictions of men in this series or the simplistic machinations employed to justify female on male violence. Understandably, the network won’t care about what I’ve wrote, and certainly the feminist minded will simply trivialize what I’m getting at. Certainly there will be those who might say, lighten up. However, I should point out that this show is part of a wider misandric presentation and there are fewer and fewer areas of media where depictions of male diversity runs different the the now conventional demonization of men in media culture. Perhaps if the show was balanced to equally make women culpable and suffer the same horrific endings I might continue watching, but I doubt the man-hating format of the series will oblige even this small suggestion of social realism.

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  3. Seeing as how in the first ep. one woman was murdered and the other framed for murder of said first woman and seeing as how this ep. start with a sex scene where the women gets choked and another gets knocked out by a man who thru most of the episode was in charged i don’t see what you are complaining about

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