Ratched – The Dance

By: Kelly Kearney

In this episode Mildred schemes her way to a promotion. Covering up for two dead bodies tied to the hospital is just the incentive Dr. Hanover needed to demote Nurse Bucket and hand the job to his new conniving nurse. Like always, there is a method to her madness and this time it comes in the form of a celebration. Everyone is invited to fox trot the night away, including the infamous Clergy Killer.

Bucket is Out and Mildred is In

We open on a dark rainy night and find Dr. Hanover (Jon Jon Briones) sitting in his car snorting some kind of medication cocktail. He looks a wreck and that’s probably because he’s meeting Mildred (Sarah Paulson) for dinner. These days she’s at the top of a very long list of people he is sick to death of. On this night he’s been summoned to discuss Edmund’s (Finn Wittrock) competency hearing and Mildred has orders for him to declare the young killer insane. On top of that, she wants him to make her head nurse. If he refuses, she will point the police in the direction of the furnace and the remains of Salvatore and Charles (Corey Stoll). Backed into a corner, the doctor has no choice but to grant Mildred her wish.

The next day Hanover informs the staff that Mildred will be replacing Nurse Bucket (Judy Davis), who will in turn get demoted. The news shocks everyone, but they soon forget the drama when she announces her first order of business: a hospital dance! Things under her leadership are about to change and everyone seems thrilled with the dance idea. Even Betsy Bucket takes the news well and tells Mildred she won’t cause her any trouble. Unfortunately, trouble is all Mildred seems to be good at because she uses their newfound truce to convince Betsy to ask their boss to the dance. She feeds into the woman’s crush by telling her the demotion came on the heels of the doctor’s romantic realizations.  His feelings for his former head nurse were always simmering beneath the surface and now that she’s not working directly under him their love can finally bloom. This excites Bucket, but has the opposite effect on Hanover who despises the woman and has done so since the day they met. Mildred could care less how he feels and orders him to accept the offer to the dance if he knows what’s good for him. Hanover’s fate is in Mildred’s hands and she reminds him of who is calling the shots; spoiler alert, it’s not him.

New Patient Charlotte

With Hanover feeling the pressure to find Edmund sane, he sinks his medical teeth into a new patient with an illness he might have a treatment for. Charlotte (Sophie Okonedo) has been struggling with memory loss, public outbursts and behaviors that lead the doctor to believe she’s suffering from a split personality disorder. After the woman freaks out in his office, he sedates her and promises to find the cure for her maladies. Mildred sees this as another opportunity to turn the Governor’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) attention away from her brother and on to someone else. If he is looking for progressive PR spins, healing this desperate woman might be enough to boost his numbers in the polls without sending her brother to the death chamber. Charlotte is now added to the cast players in Mildred’s schemes.

Later that night Mildred finds an aloof Gwendolyn (Cynthia Nixon) and tries to smooth things over with her by inviting her to dinner. At first, Gwendolyn isn’t sure she wants to be involved with the woman who runs hot and cold and can’t decide on what she wants, until Mildred comes clean about her true feelings for the red-headed Briggs. Struggling to form the words Mildred finally unleashes her truth when she admits, “I do have feelings for you. I don’t entirely understand them, so I need to do this my own way.” Fair enough, coming out can be scary but doing it in a time when lesbians must hide in the shadows or be tortured in boiling conversion baths makes this admission that much harder. Gwendolyn gets it and offers up a tidbit from her own closeted past. She hasn’t felt this way about another woman since her last love, a war nurse, died in the combat zone. This familiar story warms Mildred’s heart and she reaches out to gently touch Gwendolyn’s hand and then dives right into an invite to the hospital dance! They can go together, under the guise of chaperoning the patients. Gwendolyn happily accepts with a delighted “nothing would make me happier” and it seems these two queer and questioning characters are finally finding the love they’ve been searching for.

Trauma Can Manifest in Many Ways

After Charles landed in the hospital furnace courtesy of Nurse Ratched, Mrs. Osgood (Sharon Stone) arrives to meet with the head nurse. The accommodations at the only motel in town are not glitzy enough for her or her spoiled monkey, who incidentally needs her own room. So, after making her arrival known (and honestly nobody does that with as much campy flair as Sharon Stone) she heads to San Francisco to rent out the entire floor of a five star hotel. There she takes a meeting with Mildred and the two discuss Dr. Hanover and why Osgood wants his head. The eccentric Lenore speaks of her limbless son, Henry (Brandon Flynn), and how she never saw him settled or comfortable in his own skin. That is until he stumbled upon a cello and, like some kind of prodigy, the talent poured out of him in melodious waves. It was the first time in his young life his mother finally saw him for who he was and in her mind Dr. Hanover robbed them both of that chance for happiness. Mildred sympathizes with Lenore and offers to kill her boss but it’s going to cost the socialite one million dollars. After all, Mildred also has a family to look out for and after she disposes of Hanover, she will lose her job and their financial security. Lenore doesn’t take kindly to Mildred’s counteroffer and accuses her of taking advantage of a mother’s desperation. Like a threat through gritted teeth, she leans in with a reminder of who is calling the shots and says, “Nobody takes advantage of me.”

Cut to the hospital basement and Eddie gets a visit from Dolly (Alice Englert), who asks him to be her date to the dance. After snooping through his files, she lands on some facts that help her understand what drove him to kill those priests. The rapist who created him had it coming. Just because he wore a priest’s collar doesn’t make him any less of an evil monster. “That man put rage inside of you,” she says. “I know what that feels like because I have it inside me, too.” This is the first glimpse of the real Dolly and her issues that go much deeper than nymphomania.

Upstairs in his office Dr. Hanover prepares Charlotte for a round of hypnosis, but the treatment can only work if the woman reveals the trauma that initially caused this personality split. After an explosive emergence of all her personalities, Charlotte finally speaks her truth and TRIGGER WARNING: the story is brutal!

It all began a few years back when she was on her way to a lecture at the University of Maryland when she was attacked and kidnapped by four white men. They dragged her to a cabin in a remote location and for nine days they beat, tortured, starved and tormented her for their own entertainment. Eventually she was discovered by a local cop and he offered to save her if she didn’t press charges. Apparently, one of the men was his son and this father would rather let Charlotte die than have him face the consequences of his actions. She agreed to stay quiet and the cop gave her five dollars and a lift to the bus stop. Covered in infected sores and her own feces, she boarded the bus and tried to put the trauma behind her, but it wasn’t long before she started to having blackouts and bouts of depression which eventually led her to Dr. Hanover’s care. Revealing her secret has soothing effects after she’s instructed to never forget but move on from this horrible experience. When she wakes up he asks her how she feels and with a tear in her eye she responds “relieved.” The treatment worked and the doctor is overjoyed with the realization he finally helped someone!

Crushing the Competition

After planning her date to the dance with Dr. Hanover, Betsy Bucket invites her good friend Louise (Amanda Plummer) over for dinner and drinks. They two get on famously because whatever it is that makes these eccentric and fascinating women click, they have it in spades. As the drinks flow, the woman dance, talk about their crushes and their mutual hatred for Mildred Ratched. Betsy is convinced Dr. Hanover is in love with her, contrary to evidence that proves otherwise, and thinks Mildred is the reason they haven’t consummated their love. She goes as far as wishing her competition dead for stealing her job and pushing her further away from her one true love. To say she’s living in a fantasy world is an understatement, but now that Hanover agreed to her invitation to the dance she might be willing to drop her feud with Ratched. Besides, who has time for hate when love is in the air? If only she knew how Hanover really felt she probably wouldn’t be dreaming of a life with the doctor.

Speaking of the object of her desires, Hanover has his hands full with all the deadly women in his life and he just added Osgood to that list. At a local diner he spots her watching him and before he can pack up his lunch and run, the wealthy blonde disappears like some kind of ghost. Unsurprisingly, this freaks him out and he runs to Mildred’s motel room to fill her in on the terrifying news. She does her best to calm him down and asks him to give her time to think up a plan to keep him safe. Little does he know her plans include the opposite and his days could be numbered.

The Dance

As expected, the dance is a mix of longing lesbian gazes and total chaos. Mildred and Gwendolyn engage in innocent secret hand holding and loving looks, which is a nice palate cleanser for the hell that Edmund and Dolly unleash. Without any warning and totally not in line with Mildred’s plans, Edmund finds the hidden weapon his sister left him and slits the throat of Harold (Jermaine Williams) the guard! Dolly swoops in to grab the dying man’s gun and points it at Gwendolyn who just happens to get in her way. In a flash, Dolly pulls the trigger shooting Gwendolyn and making a path for the two lovers to escape. Mildred rushes to her lover’s side and begs her to stay with her while her brother and his manic girlfriend hop in a getaway car and take off into the night. Everything happens so fast and Mildred can only stay focused on Gwendolyn Briggs as the light slowly fades from the woman’s eyes.

In the getaway car Edmund is starting to unravel and we get another glimpse of the man behind the killer. He asks Dolly why she would shoot an innocent woman and, like some kind of breakdown mantra, he repeatedly mutters that they will pay for the violence they unleashed. Dolly, who seems to be loving all the excitement, is confused by the Clergy Killer’s empathy. Kindness doesn’t really seem to turn her on and this poses the ultimate question: who is the volatile murderer here? The priest killer or the blood thirsty nympho? With the police hot on their trail, the two ditch their car and their clothes and make their way to an abandoned farm in the woods. They will hide out there for the night and in the morning begin their life on the run. Can these two have the future they’ve envisioned? Will Gwendolyn succumb to her injuries bef0re she and Mildred can be together? What will the Governor do when he finds out Hanover’s incompetence led to the Clergy Killer’s escape? Find out in the answers to these questions and more on the next “Ratched.”