I don’t think I’ve ever seen movie or TV treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses that didn’t editorialize over the ‘life-saving’ nature of blood transfusions should the subject come up. As a rough guess, the drama over blood transfusion accounts for as much as half of all Witness mentions in movie or television. Almost always, the Witnesses get shellacked. For example, in one breathtakingly stupid episode of ‘Designated Survivor,’ an entire pack of them holed up in a cabin up there in the woods, refusing orders to evacuate as a forest fire approached, because they wanted to force the hands of doctors trying force blood on a newborn, as though they thought all the country would be captivated by their suicidal plight—and in the dopey world of TV, it was! Seemingly, the president of the United States had nothing else to do with his time that, with the eyes of the entire nation fixated on this determined bunch of crazies, this became his crisis of the week to solve. It was among the last of the Survivors my wife and I saw, a show that started out promisingly with the destruction of the U.S Capitol Building and held the suspense for a time, only to steadily deteriorate into today’s banal politics injected into an contrived setting.
So, when Dr. Blake, an Australian show set in the 1950s, plunked a Jehovah’s Witness character in the midst of a murder drama (initially as the chief suspect!), I said, “Okay, they’d better not screw this up. If they do, I’m out of here.” This would be a great shame because it is one of my top shows ever. My worries were for naught. They didn’t screw it up. That’s not to say I might not tweak a few lines here and there, but overall it was accurate—all the more impressive because it was not a portrayal of Witnesses today, but of 70 years ago.
There were such persons as the Witness lad’s mom, a fantastically overbearing woman, from whom even the police chief did not escape a thorough witness, as he relates to his fellows with the air of reliving a war story. But, when Dr. Blake is queried by his Catholic sort-of fiance, ‘Be honest. Don’t you find them weird?’ he responds that he doesn’t really think so; after all, don’t Catholics have such a thing as a Crusade in their past? Then, there was the insight as to how mom became a Witness, after her husband died and she could find no answers in the Church. There were, and continue to be, people like that. Too, the Witness lad’s faith, while making him odd, has undeniably made him honest and successful in putting a lawbreaking past behind him.
The fellow who was murdered—and the Witness lad was suspected because he had been the first to come upon him—was exactly the sort of curmudgeonly outlier person a Witness might have been drawn to. His illiteracy, which he kept secret from most persons, would not put the Witnesses off at all, as they do not judge people that way. Instead, he makes repeated visits to help him out with literacy, with witnessing demoted to a co-concern. ‘I actually liked him a lot,’ he tells the police chief. And even though he is about the only person who did in the storyline, it is instantly believable. He would.
But, the corker lies in when the kid suffers an attempt on his life and bleeds heavily, requiring a blood transfusion. Doc Blake, a forensic doctor who can, in a pinch, work on live people, is about to operate but then he checks himself. ‘Wait! This boy is a Jehovah’s Witness. We can’t use blood.’ He uses saline solution instead—without any carrying on at all about his hands being ‘tied.’ He just does it. Afterward, though the boy doesn’t enter the storyline again, he is said to be doing well and will make a full recovery. Better still, the overbearing mom grows more overbearing still, hearing only “transfusion,” and not “saline transfusion,” flying off the handle but she later apologizes to the doctor when she realizes her mistake.
I mean, you can tell when the writers have an idea of what they are talking about, unlike the Designator Surviver bozos. Somewhere, the Dr. Blake scriptwriters have found such a person. It may even be reflected in the episode’s title, “Measure Twice,” “measure” being a word used meaningfully in Witness literature. But I never thought I’d see the day when blood transfusions were mentioned in connection with Jehovah’s Witnesses without endless carrying on about how “life-saving” they are and how only a fanatic would ever not welcome one.
Few Witnesses will enjoy their portrayal, for the show makes them look like loons. However, it is in the greater context that all religion is suspected for lunacy. The episode leaves it completely to the audience to reflect upon whether standing apart from a dominant religious world, with its contradictions and harshness that causes sporadic grief to the mainline characters, is such a bad thing after all. I sort of liked the episode and was not unduly put off that it didn’t explain the Witnesses’ Kingdom hope for them. Of course, it helped that the kid didn’t end up in the hoosegow, and was cleared of all wrongdoing.
****** The bookstore
