Jacqueline Scott and brother Paul Carr take criminal charge of a hospital operating room in a second season episode of THE ROOKIES.
tossing back, “Try not to run over me.” Their scenes have all the range of real life and I cannot overstate the contribution of the late Paul Carr, far from his scared crewman on VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. This happy-go-lucky lowlife, whom she refers to as having “crawled out from under a rock,” swigs booze and plays a glassy-eyed Devil’s Advo- cate to her avenging angel. Carr is so convincing, laughing inappropriately, expounding con logic, that the contrast of her caring and his lack thereof creates real electricity.
After the captain collapses, we see Rita leaving through the concerned crowd, trying to oppress her amusement like a child who’s pulled a prank in church. Later she plots like a caged animal, and the pacing, wrung hands, fidgets, and sudden grins lead us to believe that her intensity might lead to insanity. This prompts Arnie’s hilariously snide, “If ya got nothing better to do, go hit your head against the wall a number of times.”
When they take over the operating room, she slowly approaches the unconscious captain, and what looks like the start of tears gradually morphs into a grin, then a laugh that builds and builds. Later, after the captain’s wife (very well played by Beverly Garland) bursts into the operating theater
above, Scott unleashes a flood of fury on her, prompting a warning from series regular Lt. Ryker (the fine Gerald S. O’Loughlin) that leads to a tense coda: Scott pierces him with a stare, slowly aims her gun at him, then moves her mouth in a strange feral manner. But instead of shooting, she gives him a tongue click. When he leaves, she’s racked by a violent shudder of emotions, and when finally subdued, her off-camera screams barely sound hu- man. Yet at the end, when she encounters her man lying wounded on a gurney, her sudden tenderness is every bit as strong as her hate and we are actually moved. That’s some feat.
If this sounds like a blow-by-blow, it is. I’ve seen Jacqueline Scott in many things over the years, but nothing approaching this. I take great pleasure in seeing actors, so often battling the industry’s pro- pensity for typecasting, get handed a plum role based on nothing in their oeuvre. Scott grabbed it and presented such a wealth of conflicting but real emotions inside a highly unstable shell, that I could not help but catalogue the results of her process in detail.
This episode is included in the Shout! Fac- tory release THE ROOKIES—THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON ($44.99).
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