Season 1 of this NBC/Peacock series was based on the incredible true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (played by Joshua Jackson), who was an extremely highly touted and richly compensated neurosurgeon in the state of Texas. He started out in Tennessee as a young stem-cell researcher looking at procedures for performing minimally invasive spinal surgeries for persons with chronic back and neck pain. But quickly learning that such researchers didn't get paid handsomely enough to support an ultra-luxurious (enough) lifestyle, he had decided to become a practicing neurosurgeon. Emphasize practicing, since as a fellow neurosurgeon there at Baylor Memorial Hospital, memorably played by Christian Slater, would eventually say about him, he was the most incompetent "butcher" of a surgeon that he had ever seen weild a scalpel. After turning his own BFF into a quadriplegic (!), he was finally tried and convicted for knowingly, maliciously maiming and killing at least a dozen patients in his career. The verdict: life in prison without parole.
Which brings us to Season 2. Now if you're like me, you'd naturally wonder how such a story lends itself to a second set of episodes. Because a highly touted stem-cell researcher from Italy, played by Edgar Ramirez, is receiving glowing accolades for 3D-printing biosynthetic body parts and somehow using live stem cells to make these Legos into living tissue. Of course, giving that process the critical consideration it richly deserved (by a transplant doctor played this time by actor Luke Kirby) reveals Ramirez' character to have largely invented credentials and an actual patient failure rate (like Duntsch) of essentially 100%. And here we go again!
Which brings us to Season 2. Now if you're like me, you'd naturally wonder how such a story lends itself to a second set of episodes. Because a highly touted stem-cell researcher from Italy, played by Edgar Ramirez, is receiving glowing accolades for 3D-printing biosynthetic body parts and somehow using live stem cells to make these Legos into living tissue. Of course, giving that process the critical consideration it richly deserved (by a transplant doctor played this time by actor Luke Kirby) reveals Ramirez' character to have largely invented credentials and an actual patient failure rate (like Duntsch) of essentially 100%. And here we go again!