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It was the penultimate episode of Royal Pains titled “Something Fishy This Way Comes” as perplexing problems seemed to crop up for the gang at HankMed. Ranging to matters of the heart to matters of flesh eating bacteria and infection or blood tests, the merry crew in the Hamptons had their work cut out for them. As Paige (Brooke D'Orsay) and Evan (Paulo Costanzo) deal with a woman named Lou (Rosanna Arquette) claiming to be Paige’s birth mother shows up, Hank (Mark Feuerstein) meanwhile is thrust from his wonderful relationship with Harper (Kat Foster) to international waters where his friendship (or lack thereof) with Boris (Campbell Scott)  is further tested. So how did the episode fare?

I’ll address that in a moment.

There was also a subplot about Dr. Sacani (Ben Shenkman) and Divya (Reshma Shetty) working on helping a drug pharmaceutical rep Talia Clarke (Brooke Lyons) who had sleeping beauty disorder also known on the medical field as Kleine-Levin Syndrome, which is a disorder that is characterized by excessive amounts of eating and sleeping. Further insight into the condition, as per wikipedia, states:

 “When awake, the patient’s whole demeanor is changed, often appearing “spacey” or childlike[ They also experience confusion, disorientation, complete lack of energy (lethargy), and lack of emotions (apathy). Individuals are not able to attend school or work or care for themselves. Most are bedridden, tired, and uncommunicative even when awake.”

While Divya and Sacani work close together to properly diagnose and solve Talia’s problem, Hank is elsewhere with Boris curing Dmitry Vasilyev (Mark Ivanir). Dmitry is in a war-torn country, where they can only come/go by boat at low tide in the evenings.  It isn’t necessarily a nice location for tourists especially U.S. based ones. 

It was a decent episode of Royal Pains, and yet there was something a bit off or frustrating.  While things between Harper and Hank are moving along nicely, as Feurstein and Foster’s chemistry is giving shades of Costanzo and D’Orsay, the real brunt of the episode seemed to be about repairing Hank and Boris’ friendship/relationship.

While this is fine, and the episode’s interplay between Boris and Hank on the beach location actually with Dmitry was well-done and really conveyed the differences and similarities between both men.  Hank is ever to eager to be friends with Boris, but has grown tired of the friendship being consistently on Boris’ terms.  Hank is more than understanding towards Boris’ concerns and plights, but yet, the feeling of being treated as someone who is given the impression of being used for something, than being a friend can be a bit daunting. 

Then why is it that the relationship, the real meat of the episode of Hank and Boris working together to get to Dmitry felt left on the cutting room floor or just quickly by-passed all together? Both Scott and Feuerstein are fine actors and both chew scenery in their time together on screen in Royal Pains, so it felt that the show took a difficult task and made it too easy. While the dialogue and scenes later in the episode did all the heavy lifting, it felt that it went too quickly from Hank and Boris shouting to walking on to shore being okay and happy with each other.  What about the arguments that Boris would have to come with Hank? They can barely stand to be in the same space together, that has to account for something, but yet, it seems it doesn’t.  While one could argue the whole idea of Hank is more concerned about his patient, at some point, especially seeing how petty Hank, like any human being, could be at the beginning of the season with Evan and Divya, it creates a bit of a ‘wait a second, was something left out here’ moment.

With that said, any problems with that was overcome by the whole Hank and Boris on the island and some of their scenes together as again, both actors are no slouch and the writing here did service the characters, but it felt that this was something that might have been better in the finale, and not the penultimate episode.

The problem though with any USA Network show is that things have to be kept breezing along at a nice quick pace, so even other shows that, like Royal Pains that do fantastic story-arcs for the season like Suits and Covert Affairs seem to do a wonderful job building up story-arcs and then quickly resolving them for the season finale or mid-season finale when taking a bit more time to flesh out some of the story ideas would be even better. Now this is also being said without seeing the season finale, so this could be taken out of context with what the show writers have in store for HankMed.

Overall, Royal Pains had a serviceable episode with “Something Fishy This Way Comes”, and it will be interesting to see where the series will go in the season four finale.