Netflix’s Pulse, which began streaming the first week of April, has unsurprisingly made it into the streamer’s Top 10 in its first week. People sure love a medical drama, and they especially love a soapy one, with shades of Grey’s Anatomy meets Scandal, and a complicated romance at the center. The problem with Netflix’s Pulse is that, as much as we want to present the romance at the center of it as complicated, deep down, it really isn’t.
“When I was writing the pilot, I didn’t really set out to write a medical show or a hurricane show. I was wanting to write the story of this Danny and Phillips relationship,” Pulse creator Zoe Robyn told TheWrap. “I was kind of drawing on some personal experiences of my own. Creating this character of Danny was a little bit of therapy in exploring my own anxieties and fears and anger about the situation that I had found myself in.”
The situation, to make it clear, is that Danielle “Danny” Simms is dating her boss, Xander Phillips. She says no to him multiple times, worried about the complications a relationship with him might have for her career. Ultimately, he wins her over, and yet he never really seems to understand or respect her boundaries, leaving Danny in a place where she never feels comfortable about their relationship. It all culminates in a bad fight and in Danny reporting him for sexual harassment.
For Xander, things are back and white. He and Danny were in a relationship, therefore, she’s lying about the rest. For Danny, it’s a lot more complicated, particularly as some separation from their romance allows her to fully take stock of the power imbalance between the two and how that factored into her decision to enter into the relationship in the first place.
What the show presents throughout its ten episodes is a very clear-cut story of a man who used his power to pressure a woman into a relationship. There isn’t any other way to interpret what happened. The fact that Danny eventually fell for him is added to muddle the waters, but it doesn’t change the initial correction or excuse his abuse of power—particularly when the show makes a point to show us that it was Xander who argued against reporting their relationship to HR, without any consideration to what the secret coming out later would do to Danny’s career.
And yet, Pulse itself, and because of it, fans of the show, fail in the most grievous way possible by refusing to pick a side. A show cannot tell a story like this one as a mere impartial observer, and yet Pulse tries to do just that and comes up with a story that, at times, makes Danny feel like she imagined every moment of her relationship with Xander that made her uncomfortable.
But so many of us have been there before and recognize those moments. And they are not in our imaginations. So the show trying to showcase this like a romance of two flawed people who didn’t handle a complicated relationship right feels hollow, particularly when at the end of this, all Danny is looking for from Xander is some acknowledgment that he wronged her.
She gets that. He apologizes. But it’s hard to tell if he understands what he did wrong. It’s hard to tell if the show does. We, after all, go back to a somewhat flirty dynamic between them, like the things that happened can just be swept away, like there still isn’t a power imbalance between them. There is no fresh start for Danny and Xander, and there shouldn’t be, at least not romantically.
In the end, Pulse is trying really hard to show us a “complicated, messy” romance. And people and relationships are, indeed, messy. The way they feel about each other can continue to be that if the show wishes. It is possible to live in the grey there. But what happened between Danny and Xander wasn’t. He was in the wrong. That much is very, very clear.
Pulse is now streaming on Netflix.
