After facing an unknown virus and a flood, the caregivers in the series Hippocrates are not at the end of their sentence. The new season opens outside the Poincaré hospital: Alyson (Alice Belaïdi), who now works at SOS Médecins, is called to a sensitive city and finds herself attacked by the relatives of a young drug addict, ulcerated by having waited for help for six hours. The strike, launched immediately by Alyson’s colleagues, constitutes the grain of sand which seizes the hospital machine, faced with an unprecedented influx of patients in the heart of summer.
This first episode, dark and nervous, sets the tone for a season that does not spare the viewer. Author-director Thomas Lilti does not lose the direction he has set since the launch of the series in 2018: drawing attention to the fragility of the public hospital, to the suffering of caregivers faced with shortages chronicle of means. Bed closures, understaffed services, summer is a particularly critical period and emergency doctors find themselves having to triage patients and practice medicine expeditiously, at the risk of missing a serious case.
More incisive than ever
Chloé (Louise Bourgoin) then finds a plan B: clandestinely reopen a disused wing of the hospital to house patients who cannot decently be sent home. Can this parallel system, outside of any legal framework, really work? Response at the end of the six episodes which mix up many current themes: exhaustion of parents of young psychotics, mistreatment of the elderly…
Thomas Lilti also injects the series, more incisive than ever, with a dose of humor with the presence of a film crew, who will lend medical equipment to Chloé’s makeshift hospital. A mise en abyme taken from reality: during the Covid pandemic, production provided masks, gowns, IV stands, etc., to “real” caregivers who were sorely lacking them!