From pet monkeys, to ice picks and stolen peaches,
Sarah Paulson's super-stylish Nurse Ratched has arrived on Netflix taking us on a dark
horror-filled tour of the American psychiatric care system.
Yippee-ki-yay movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video we're taking a deep
dive into Ratched Season 1, the ending and the 4-season arc planned for
the series, plus I'll point out some cool details you
might have missed.
Spoilers ahead, so take care if you haven't seen the show yet.
In terms of Ratched's brother Edmund, by the end of the final episode, he and Mildred have
become enemies.
Edmund's botched attempt at escape with Dolly put him under a stricter lockdown when he
was recaptured, and with an excruciating death awaiting him
in the electric chair, Mildred decides to secretly euthanise him
herself.
But when Charlotte Wells, now in her Dr Hanover persona, breaks him out, he discovers his
sister's plan, which turns him against her.
With no other way out, obviously Mildred's intention was to stop
him suffering an agonising death in the electric chair,
but Edmund doesn't see it that way, even though he himself was to blame for screwing
up their original plan to get him off the death sentence at the Spring dance.
On top of that, Edmund still seems to blame Mildred for running when he murdered their
abusive foster parents, even though he told her to leave.
So when Edmund reveals he massacred seven nurses in Chicago, Mildred understands he's
coming for her, thus setting him up to be her primary antagonist in Season 2.
And given that Dolly shot Gwen during her and Edmund's escape, I think it's possible
that he could try and hurt his sister by targeting Gwendolyne as well.
If Edmund does end up killing Gwen, this could be particularly traumatic for Mildred, given
how she helped her accept her sexuality and learn how to love.
"My feelings for you are the truest thing in me.
I love you."
Gwen's death might be what sets Mildred off down an even darker and more repressive path
again, taking her closer to the cold and hardened
character of Nurse Ratched we see in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,
which this series is a prequel to.
As for Edmund's ultimate fate, there could be a clue in the way the TV show seems to
present some parallels between him and Jack Nicholson's character Randle in the movie.
For example, in the opening scene of the first episode,
Edmund wears a leather jacket and green T-shirt similar to Randle's leather jacket that he
wears when we he arrives at the hospital and also his green T-shirt.
There's also the way that Edmund tries to fake that he's insane to make sure that he
doesn't stand trial, which is similar to how Nicholson's Randle
pretended to be mentally ill in the movie to get out of doing hard labour in prison.
And by the end of Season 1, Edmund is now Mildred's primary antagonist, just like Randle
became Nurse Ratched's principal adversary in the movie.
So, given Mildred tells Edmund, that she's the one who'll be coming after him,
I wonder whether he'll end up captured by Mildred and then lobotomised to neutralise
the threat he poses to her, similar to what happened to Randle in Cuckoo's
Nest, and ironically similar to how Mildred originally
saved Edmund from the surviving priest's eye-witness testimony.
And in her eyes, Mildred might even see lobotomising Edmund as an act of mercy of sorts so that
he can no longer continue his murderous ways.
What's interesting about how the first season of Ratched ends is the extent to which Mildred
subverts our expectations of her based on how she was initially depicted in the season's
early episodes.
In Mildred's opening scene in the Pilot, we get a sense of her brooding darkness and
inner repression as she watches a couple engaged in heavy PDA,
then proceeds to scold a distracted gas attendant about his filthy fingernails.
We then watch her lie her way into a nurse's position at Lucia State Hospital where she
encourages a patient's suicide which she then helps Dr Hanover cover up.
Using this as leverage, she has him make her head nurse, taking over from Nurse Bucket.
And there's an interesting detail which foreshadows the way Mildred quickly insinuates herself
into this position of power when Bucket brings some lilies of the valley into Hanover's office.
The lily of the valley is a species of flower that spreads aggressively and which is toxic,
sometimes lethal.
Already by the second episode, we see how Mildred is excited to observe Dr Hanover's
demonstration of the lobotomy procedure on four newly arrived patients,
and with her passive-aggressive threats against anyone who wrongs her,
it sets us up to assume she'll be travelling down a progressively darker path as the season
goes on.
"What are you gonna do about it?
What are you, deaf?"
"No.
I'm just thinking of all the things I'm going to do about it."
Which is why it feels surprising when Mildred turns compassionate towards Betsy after she's
rejected by Dr Hanover at the Spring dance.
Despite the evidence of a more human side, Mildred clearly has this dark underbelly and
admits to Gwen that she holds no regrets for everything she's done.
"The lies I told to get into that hospital, to get closer to Edmund...
Those were amoral acts, and I understand that completely, but you must understand that I
had no choice.
And if I had to, I would do it all over again."
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Sarah Paulson said that she identifies "very deeply with [Mildred's]
loneliness" and thinks that what drives her character
is "a pursuit of survival and of finding some sense of home.
[It's] sort of an animal need that blinds her to the inappropriateness of some her actions."
A character who we may see return in the second season is the odious Henry,
the son of Miss Osgood who according to his mother's will finds himself disinherited and
destined to be sent to a psychiatric institution at the end of Season 1.
It's not hard to think that he'll probably end up at Lucia State Hospital,
where he might try to manipulate any of the nurses looking after him,
similar to how he had his mother brutally killed by one of his servants.
And if Henry discovers it was Mildred who was paid a large bounty from his mother in
return for Dr Hanover's head, then he might try and blackmail her;
though I can't imagine the outcome would be favourable for him if he gets on her bad side.
By the way, there was an intriguing detail I noticed in the scene when Mildred presents
Miss Osgood with Dr Hanover's head.
The painting that's positioned perfectly between the two women is Salome with the decapitated
head of John the Baptist.
Like Miss Osgood, who requested Dr Hanover's head as revenge for his part in her son losing
his limbs, in the Bible Salome requested the head of John be brought to her as vengeance
on behalf of her mother.
Another way that Mildred rationalises both her good and bad actions is through the idea
that she's an "angel of mercy".
This theme first came up in the pilot episode: "I admire nurses more than anything.
They really are God's angels."
"Yes.
Yes, we are."
This is developed further in the two "Angel of Mercy" episodes where Huck calls Mildred
by that name after she helps two patients escape so they no longer have to undergo the
cruel hydrotherapy treatments, a form of conversion therapy designed to supposedly
eradicate their lesbianism.
"You're an angel.
What you did for those women.
Mildred Ratched... you're an angel of mercy."
Then there are the flashbacks to Ratched's time as a nurse during the war, when she would
frequently euthanise severely wounded soldiers who asked her to put them out of their misery.
The term "angel of mercy" also has multiple layers of meaning.
It's sometimes used as a nickname for nurses in general, with Florence Nightingale being
one of the first nurses who was dubbed an "angel of mercy".
And then there's the criminological use of the term,
where it refers to serial killers, frequently caregivers who decide to kill their
patients whether it be for compassionate or sadistic reasons rather than treat them.
I also noticed the artwork on the Netflix page for Ratched has Rorschach-test inkblots
positioned behind Mildred that give the impression of angel wings emerging from behind her.
Ratched also perceives herself as an angel of mercy, believing that she's helping some
of her victims find peace from their suffering.
"You have been subjected to enough pain.
You deserve someone to show you mercy, Mr. Salvatore."
Engineering Salvatore's suicide was, of course, self-serving for Mildred, but an even more
shocking example of how she can quickly switch between compassion and brutality is in the
fourth episode.
In the course of one evening, Mildred helps Ingrid and Lily escape their
shockingly painful hydrotherapy treatments, but at the same time with the help of Dr Hanover,
she locks Charles Wainwright into one of the tanks and turns the temperature up to a level
that will boil him alive.
Getting rid of Charles is not only expedient as it's yet another death on the hospital
premises that Mildred can hold over Hanover, but it's also a form of revenge for the poor
way Charles treated her.
The series really whipsaws us in the way we often simultaneously see cruelty and kindness
in Mildred.
At the same time that she and Betsy conspire to turn Dr Hanover in to the authorities,
she kindly asks Bucket to make Huck head nurse, because she knew he was suffering from a feeling
of lack of purpose in his life.
The reveal of her dreadful childhood also makes her more sympathetic.
Mildred is most definitely a complicated but intriguing character and Gwendolyne expresses
how she and perhaps many viewers may feel about her when she says:
"I don't understand how I got so... tangled up in you."
That's also a nice reference to the opening title sequence for the series in which we
see characters chasing and pulling on a tangled red string that leads to Nurse Ratched.
Something that's also a major theme in the first season of Ratched is the idea of image,
façade, and fantasy; in particular our protagonist Mildred who
presents herself as the image of a perfect nurse while also dressed to the nines.
However, this is a false image or façade as Mildred never trained as a nurse and lied
her way into the army, falsified her interview letter with Dr Hanover,
her clothes are stolen, and despite her lesbian fantasies, she tries
to repress these feelings by having sex with Charles Wainwright and uses roleplays to get
through this.
There's also the hospital itself which is decked out like a luxury hotel despite being
financially on the brink of closing down.
Numerous other characters also live in their own fantasy worlds.
Dolly sees herself as a kind of movie star and romanticises her escape with serial killer
Edmund.
"This is killer-diller good luck.
Like Bonnie and Clyde."
This fantasy leads to a tragic end for her though, because similar to Bonny and Clyde,
Dolly gets herself killed when the pair are discovered by the police.
Betsy Bucket also has a misguided belief or fantasy that Dr Hanover actually cares for
her, when in reality he can't stand her.
And he himself is living a double-life, hiding from his past and his disaster with Miss Osgood's
son Henry.
Tragically, and perhaps ironically, Dr Hanover ends up killed by his patient Charlotte
Wells when her psyche breaks and she takes on one of her fantasy personas,
believing Hanover to be Adolf Hitler.
That personality is based on Jesse Owens, the African American athlete who won four
gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in Nazi Germany.
In contrast to the others living in a fantasy, the main character who deals with things in
a much more straightforward way is Huck.
Huck is damaged too, but his character's wounds are more external rather than internalised
like many of the others.
And for me, I was gutted when he was killed as he felt like one of the only truly decent
characters in the show.
If you're wondering about how long Ratched will run for, well, Ryan Murphy apparently
has four seasons mapped out, each one featuring a different male adversary for Mildred.
For Season 1, this was Dr Hanover, and it looks like Edmund will be her main antagonist
in the second season.
Sarah Paulson has also said that by the fourth season she expects the show to be in the events
of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, so that could mean we'll see Randle McMurphy show
up to oppose Mildred.
I expect if that happens, there will a few changes to the story from the film, in a similar
way to how Bates Motel modified some of the events from Psycho in its final season.
So, what did you think about the first season of Ratched?
And do you have any predictions or things you'd like to see in the second season?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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