Hippocrates on Canal+ what is season 3 worth? [critique]

Three years after episodes marked by Covid, Thomas Lilti's hospital series returns for a season marked by insubordination. Because, despite the necessary distance, Hippocrates shows caregivers fighting the last chance fight.

We remember how much the filming of season 2 ofHippocrates, started at the beginning of 2020, had taken the full brunt of the reality of the health situation. A few weeks after the first shots, the Covid had pushed Thomas Liltia former doctor, to take back the coat and rewrite the last episodes, knowing how to maintain reason and with an acuity impossible to fault. Its broadcast, which occurred in April 2021, while France was facing a new confinement, had abolished the boundaries between life and fiction.

This season 3 (filming of which began in spring 2023) is this time enveloped in a cold observation which will surprise no one. The situation at the public hospital is not great, to put it mildly. The characters ofHippocrates, precise reflections of healthcare workers, remain exhausted by the health crisis and the means are still waiting… Thomas Lilti, practically alone in writing for the first time, drives the point home by attacking the subject from another side.

It all starts with the closure of emergency services during the summer period, due to lack of resources. This is what will lead the heroes of the first seasons, whom the trials have scattered, to come back together to deal with the situation. Chloé (Louise Bourgoin), Alyson (Alice Belaïdi), Arben (Karim Leklou) and Hugo (Zacharie Chasseriaud) therefore find themselves where everything has played out for them since the beginning (it is the talent of the screenwriter to re-establish the stakes in the tumult). Rebuilding will allow them to measure the gap dug by the difficulties which have continued to pile up.

In fact, this new intrigue is approached as the season-summary of the hospital crisis, which asserts itself more political than ever and which even intersects, by ricochet, with the nursing home scandal. It's overflowing everywhere and the caregivers are drawing on their last reserves. Lilti's production also marks a turning point when it transcribes this feeling of permanent asphyxiation and overflow. Witness this episode 4 which sets a claustrophobic atmosphere, in a more compact season (because two episodes have been reduced compared to the previous ones), and where the tensions appear tenfold.

Without ignoring their priesthood, the companions in trouble try everything for everything and literally sink into the bowels of the hospital in the hope of gaining time, semblance of means, and above all a little hope, by taking action. against their hierarchy. Desperate maneuver to escape sorting of patients, to be able to treat them outside closing hours… in short, to fulfill their mission.

Hippocrates season 3, from November 11 on CANAL+

The protagonists ofHippocrates, who have never flirted so much with illegality, now act underwater like undercover agents. On screen, the story plays out on two fronts. The world below challenges the world above, throughout a season where the parallel is constant between camps and visions (the affect opposed to a more procedural bureaucracy). The viewer, however seasoned, of the series, witnesses the situation in shock, through the eyes of a new protagonist played by an actor accustomed to the director's filmography and who was missing Hippocrates : William Lebghil.

His character as a liberal ophthalmologist becomes the incredulous accomplice of tinkering and cheating, final desperate gestures to denounce the absurd in political decisions and a denial of reality which has never seemed so glaring. The observation is bitter. The hidden initiatives of its heroes reveal so many inevitable stumbling blocks despite the ardent desire to do the best. “In times of shortage, there is no good solution,” launches Chloé/Louise Bourgoin, fatalistic and yet never resigned. There remains humanity.