What You Can Do With A Kangaroo: Neonatal Miracles

November 12, 2009

This week's Grey's Anatomy contained a storyline guaranteed to melt hearts: Dr. Karev, who's always shown a knack for pediatrics, was compelled -- first by instinct, then by Miranda Bailey -- to shuck his shirt and hold a premature child against his chest for what seemed like days. The kid showed rapid recovery -- as anyone would in Alex's capable yet wounded bad-boy arms -- but the whole thing was just... Weird. Bailey kept calling it "Kangaroo Hold," as though that meant something. But in my head, I'm the Baby Whisperer, so if I haven't heard of it, I have a hard time believing it exists. And, of course, with just a little detective action, we at the Remote Location have learned not only that it exists, but... It might just be as magical as Bailey made it seem.

Somewhere Over The Cuckoo's Nest: The Shock Of Hope

November 10, 2009

It's always nice to find out that something scary isn't that scary -- or to see a blind spot you've carried over your received knowledge for years. On last week's Private Practice, an unstable (or is she?) psychiatrist, in recovery from her horrific mangling in last season's cliffhanger, gave a patient electroconvulsive therapy. Between the automatic red flags and Cuckoo's Nest nightmares the phrase brings up, the general weirdness of Violet this season, and the rest of her practice's freakouts about it, you might think this was exactly the wrong wronger wrongest possible course of action. But as Violet explains -- and the science confirms -- ECT has quietly become a respected, if cautiously so, therapy.

We Are Of Peace, Always: The Science & Religion Of V

November 03, 2009

One expects that the scientific and medical wonders of the Visitors in ABC's reboot will be of ongoing interest -- at least for the five episodes we'll get to see before the show goes on a long hiatus. But some of the incidental and/or pretty details in the show's first episode have a stronger basis in current science and technology than you might realize.

We Have Always Lived In The Dollhouse: Neuroleptic Malignant Sierra

October 26, 2009

On the last pre-hiatus episode of the cancelled Whedon epic Dollhouse, we were given a glimpse into the past of one of the show's most beloved characters: Displaced artist Priya Tsetsang, known in the House as active Sierra. While we knew from previous stories ("Needs") the basics of Sierra's entrée into the active life -- kidnapped and sold into Dollhouse slavery by an obsessed lover -- we didn't know the details... Or why, in the unaired and brilliant "Epitaph One" Priya/Sierra was so pointedly and violently dead-set against taking her psychoactive meds.

"Belonging" (written by the talented team that brought us "Epitaph One") explained both in detail, in one of the most emotionally and ethically challenging episodes of the series to date. The obsessed, a selfish and bratty billionaire, used overdoses to fake a psychotic break, resulting in Sierra's institutionalization amid claims of a paranoia scenario as chilling as it was realistic. We knew that her paranoid rantings, classics of the madhouse trope, were not only verifiably true but also part of a grander scheme to punish Priya in the sickest manner imaginable... Something not even Priya could know for sure. Never has the second season's repeated mantra, "I know what I know," been so vertiginously hard to prove.

Freeze Frame: Big Bang Theory's Eidetic Sideswipe

October 20, 2009

On this week's Big Bang Theory -- a show once considered to be low-level comedy at the expense of its characters/audience and now one of the most highly regarded sitcoms by most viewers, including exactly those same people -- we were treated to that age-old confusion surrounding the terms "photographic memory" and "eidetic memory."

Low-grade autistic and all-around geek Sheldon, in his usual uncanny and abrupt manner, informed us that "photographic" was merely an imprecise term for the more obscure-sounding term, but as usual, the show's attempts to both impress with jargon -- while dumbing things down for accessibility's sake -- managed only to sideswipe the point while getting on with its actual purpose, which is to make us laugh.

But having stumbled across the confusion surrounding these terms more than once, we here at the Remote Location decided to take a closer look once and for all at the phenomenon. Turns out the literature, and the internet, aren't exactly sure either. But after looking at a bunch of interesting experiments and case studies, it looks like the answers are as interesting as they are complex. (And/or nonexistent, depending on your definition of "answers.")

This Is Fringe, Not Farscape: The Case Of The Dream Thief

October 16, 2009

In last week's episode of Fringe, a guy went nuts on his coworkers and imagined a lot of demons and scary stuff -- visually, not unlike the gamer kid's fantasies from a House episode earlier this season -- before dying of exhaustion. Come to find out that this is because he has a chip in his head that allows his doctor to induce a sleep state, then siphon off his dreams. We're told that they are intoxicating, not unlike LSD apparently, which is what has made the doctor such an addict.

Cancer? Prison Inmates? Enough. More Zombies.

October 12, 2009

But, you're saying, those Haitian zombies are totally '80s -- and too realistic (and sad) to be that interesting. The zombies of today are apocalyptic Romero monsters, moving very slowly or very fast, hungering for brains. How could they happen? Um, like so many ways.

My Tiger Cage, Your Debt To Society: Solitary Confinement

October 07, 2009

On this week's episode of Special Victim's Unit, the brilliant Deborah Ann Woll (from True Blood) was apparently abducted by her downstairs neighbor (the just-as-brilliant but better-recognized Stephen Rea), who was driven crazy by his nineteen years in solitary. As somebody who can't go five seconds without checking email, talking to a stranger, or dialing my phone, I know solitary confinement would drive me nuts... But is that true for everybody?

Seriously, What Is The Actual Deal With Lymphoma?

October 05, 2009

You know what's scarier than zombies? Cancer. Cancer is like the medical world's version of Godwin's Law: It's the worst thing there is. And this week, it struck Kitty McAllister on ABC's Brothers & Sisters. It was a lymphoma, which like the leukemias made it twice as hard to visualize, making it five times harder to understand. All that's really important is that they called it by the wrong name.

(The Serpent & The) Rainbow Connection: Real Zombies

October 04, 2009

On a recent episode of the show Supernatural -- whose very name tells you we shouldn't be talking about it on this blog -- we learned that a demonic zombie virus is the Devil's endgame, set to decimate the world's population in five years. I'm not so sure about that. But I am totally interested in the zombie resurgence, and since it's October I thought we could talk about monsters and ghoulies and such this month. So: Zombies. What are they about?