Anatomy of a Shorty death

difficult patient who’ll have his morphine nicked by Deb, then die at her hands. (As Fleming says, ‘‘Everyone loves a killer nurse.’’)

What if, says medical adviser Caroline Restall, ‘‘the patient’s so irascible that he scratches Mo, and Deb fixes Mo up?’’ (This is cunning, as it simultaneously serves the Deb-Mo storyline.) Fleming: ‘‘Yeah, that’s sweet.’’ Trainee storyliner Lily Daubney: ‘‘Can he have Alzheimer’s as well?’’

Fleming: ‘‘I don’t think we need that.’’

Details need finessing. Is the patient’s pain terminal cancer or just a bad back? Will Deb kill him with an opioid, or simply inject him with air? That’d work, says Restall, because ‘‘if there’s a post-mortem they’ll not spot that’’.

‘‘Just give him drugs,’’ says Fleming. ‘‘They don’t do an autopsy, do they?’’

By late afternoon, the major storylines are clear and Andrews is at a whiteboard, figuring out which stories belong in which episode. Each episode can support three main stories, and one of those must provide a ‘‘cliff’’ (short for cliffhanger) as the closing scene.

There’s a stalker storyline that’ll definitely provide a cliff. An argument between Mo and Kate makes another. Monday is a double-episode, so it needs two: the first could be Nurse Deb stealing the morphine from the patient (who’s now called Mr Hawthorne, a name plucked from the air by Kightley), and the second cliff could be Deb killing him, though arguably Pele’s illness would work too.

But they’re still a couple of cliffs short.

Story editor Paul Hagan muses about how to plug the gaps.

‘‘Is there a contentious work situation that puts TK at odds with Harper? What about a tricky, hilarious patient? Chronic flatulence that clears the ED?’’

Kightley chips in: ‘‘Yeah, but TK grew up in Rotorua, so he can cope.’’

Everyone laughs, but it doesn’t make it on to Andrews’ whiteboard.

Day 4: Still storylining

By Thursday, Block 1259’s coming along nicely. All the cliffs are locked in and the infinite branches of plot possibility have been pruned into a manageable bush. The team has thinned out too – today it’s just Andrews and Hagan racing through episodes scene by scene as Daubney and her fellow storyliner Tiernan Whitten take notes.

Mr Hawthorne has been renamed Mr Gooch, which seems appropriately grinchy. But Whitten has a concern.

‘‘Isn’t gooch, um, slang for something?’’

Daubney consults her laptop: ‘‘Urbandictionary.com says it’s the area that attaches one’s sack to one’s a...hole.’’

‘‘That’s what I thought,’’ says Whitten. ‘‘I didn’t want to say.’’

Mr Gooch seems ripe for renaming, but then Daubney checks the online White Pages, and finds some real people of that name.

OK, says Andrews, ‘‘then I think we can get away with it’’.

‘‘Anyway,’’ says Hagan, ‘‘he is an a...hole, so calling him that is perfect’’.

Mr Gooch it is.