Five Days At Memorial Episode 1,2 & 3 Review, Recap, Story Explained: AppleTV+ has just released its new show titled “Five Days At Memorial” which is based on a book of the same name by Sheri Fink who is also the Producer of this Mini-Series which focuses on the 5 Days at the Baptist Memorial Centre of New Orleans when it was hit by the hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
The series has a stellar cast starring Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Robert Pine, and many other talents. This is a hard-hitting accounting of what exactly happened at that time and how the doctors and medical professionals had to make decisions that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
The Series is out with its first 3 Episodes with an average runtime of 40 Minutes. The Episodes give us the accounts of those 5 Days right from the start until the end, and what happened at each day encompassed into respective episodes. The first Episode starts off from the night Katrina is supposed to hit New Orleans and how everyone thought it would be like any other hurricane they’ve encountered previously and how it slowly starts off being something they have never seen as Katrina starts to wreak havoc on New Orleans.
However, Katrina doesn’t stay long in New Orleans and just touches and leaves off to another place meaning New Orleans was not much affected by the hurricane. That’s the first day but what happens after that is what made all the difference.
We get to know in Episode 2 that a levee is sort of a flood bank that stores water and its purpose is to store overflowing rivers. Now, a specific levee breaks and that water is slowly coming to New Orleans and that too in masses.
The hospital wasn’t aware of that until they were alarmed by the National Guard and that leaves them with little time to prepare. With no time in their hands and no help to how to even go about evacuation when their parent company i.e., Tenet Healthcare wouldn’t even do anything, we see chaos ensuing and that is just the beginning.
At the start of Episode 1, we see that after everything, the Hospital had 45 dead people and that is something very alarming. Doctors are getting questioned for that as we see in the interviews. What we’re also seeing is, how fragile all of it is because it just took 5 days for everything to break.
We also see racism in the show as well because at one side we have looting happening outside and on the other hand, there’s tension between a senior and junior doctor in which the Junior Doctor is a black man, and the senior won’t even look at him and give orders when his direct order is denied by the junior doctor for a good enough reason.
The show is a hard-hitting and well, a big-budget Mini-Series that is a recollection of a catastrophic natural disaster and how it created disparities, and like a house of cards, it didn’t take much time for everything to fall down. It touches upon a lot of issues that America has been facing for a long time.
The first 3 days of this series are done and the remaining Episodes of this 8 part series will be released weekly.