#sorry that was a bit of an essay
Let’s think of dramatic storylines that would have worked for Berena without killing anyone (now we know a child’s death was always going to happen, Catherine exit or no Catherine exit.)
I’ll start.
- Serena coming to terms with her identity
- Bernie trying to repair her relationship with her children
- The finalisation of Bernie’s divorce
- Jason being assessed by ATOS or similar and losing all his support
- Serena dealing with homophobia for the first time ever
- Dealing with Bernie’s hangups around truth and intimacy
- The loss of the trauma unit (this is similar to a child dying, lol)
- Both of them trying to navigate complicated relationships with the other’s children
- Alex coming back to locum leading to jealousy and insecurity
Reblog and add yours.
Elinor is into drugs and ends up needing rehab, Serena takes time to help her
Bernie gets asked to rejoin the military
Elinor is pregnant but it’s a difficult pregnancy so Serena takes time to help
Jason does get injured in some way and Serena takes time to care for him
A homophobic patient accuses them of something they didn’t do
• Serena is accused of negligence after a patient dies and is suspended
• Although she is happy, Serena’s drinking becomes a problem (perhaps connected to the above)
• Elinor has to move home due to her issues and we get some domestic Bernie / Serena time before Serena decides to take Elinor away for a “year out” for them both. Bernie visits them
• Serena protests against NHS cuts and engages in a war of words with a local Tory MP, who contrives to have her suspended
There are already some excellent ideas for how Serena could otherwise have been granted her exit on this thread, so I’m going to concentrate on the question of dramatic storylines*. How about some actual medical drama? Remember how ER would most often make the drama stem from the people who came through the doors, but make it relevant to various regular cast members?
For instance… there’s an RTC and a couple in their early 60s are involved; one of them has minor injuries but the other is quite badly hurt. While their partner is in surgery, the other talks sadly about how they had only found each other later in life, and they don’t want their time together to be cut even shorter. Bernie and Serena look at each other and Bernie does that working-her-jaw-to-hold-it-all-together thing that makes me melt.
We know this stuff works - look at the soldier that was on Darwin while Bernie was working up there, or Cam being injured, or even Serena’s old teacher turning up on AAU (we’ll take out the dead daughter and persecuting Jasmine bit). You can have your helicopter crashes and your rampaging gunmen and your stabbings and even your daughter-bashes-head-on-steering-wheel-and-dies-slow-and-tragic-deaths, but they need to be used more sparingly than the past couple of seasons of Holby.
*Actually I lied, I have something to say on this. Ric disappears for weeks and months all the time without so much as a one-line explanation. It’s fucking bullshit to say that in order for Catherine to take some time out, they needed to have Elinor taking drugs, hating Bernie/being homophobic, and running a car into Jason and then dying, so that Serena would fall apart. Talk about an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. We could have had close to three months of Berena on screen together, with a side-serving of Elinor doing drugs (say) and Serena eventually taking some time out to help her, as others have suggested above. We could even have had some bonus Useless Edward™
