He tries to break the chain, but it’s too tight. He then screams for help. Finally, he takes his bearings and realizes that he has a bed and some necessities: toothbrush, toilet paper, and even his foot cream. Someone has provided for him.
Alan, a young man in his early twenties, tells his therapist, Gene, that he’s been abused by his father as a child. The abuse left him with scars on his body and a deep-seated anger that he can’t control. ..
Alan’s sessions with the therapist are interrupted by his own personal life. He has a bad dream, in which his wife holds a guitar and a baby cries, their face distorted and unnatural. The next day, Alan brings his son Ezra his wife’s guitar. Ezra apathetically reveals that he doesn’t play any more.
In his next session with Gene, Alan tells his client that he’s been keeping himself closed off from the difficult conversations. He says Gene needs to be able to tell him the hard things.
It can’t be a coincidence that, later that night, Alan is knocked out while checking on a disturbance outside his home. He wakes up with a chain around his leg.
Gene tells him, “I know this sucks,” and his face is free of sunglasses now. Although his name isn’t really Gene, but Sam.
Alan pleads with Sam to help him. He’s out of options, and wasn’t getting anywhere in therapy. He needs to proceed with therapy in a safe place–here.
Sam says that he has a compulsion to kill people. He has killed several people, and he is still looking to kill another man. There is another man who he has wanted to kill for months, and he has just barely held himself back.
He wants to stop killing, but he also wants the help of Dr. Alan Strauss. ..
The Episode Review
FX’s new series, The Americans, stars Steve Carell as a U.S. intelligence officer who is caught up in the espionage world of the Soviet Union. The show is introduced with a reserved nature, as it seems to be set in a time before the Cold War and before the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Patient is a slow-burn psychological thriller that asks its viewers to be patient as it lays the groundwork for a fascinating exploration of the patient/therapist dynamic. The film starts off by introducing us to its two main characters, a therapist and her patient, and spends the rest of its runtime slowly building up their relationship until it reaches a dramatic climax. While there are some thrilling twists in The Patient, it is ultimately more concerned with exploring the dynamics between these two characters than shocking its audience. ..
This first episode leaves much to go off of in predicting where the series will lead. But if the underlying dark humour and stellar performances of Carell and Domhnall Gleeson are any indication, it should be a good show.
