Thrilling hospital drama, Breathless, is now on Netflix. Set in the fictional Joaquin Sorolla Public Hospital, Breathless follows the staff and patients as they try to navigate a system that is overwhelmed, understaffed, and underpaid. Alongside the overload of patients to treat, the staff of the Sorolla Hospital are also navigating the drama of their own family and social lives.
With eight episodes available to watch, the show’s pilot episode sets the stage for what’s to come. And, much like any intense hospital drama, there’s an abundance of acutely stressful moments, political disputes, and growing complications around the stressed and overworked public health system.
With all that in mind, here’s our Breathless episode 1 recap, with fair warning that there are spoilers ahead. So, make sure you’ve streamed the episode first, or proceed without it, if you’re eager to know what happens.
Doctors on strike
We begin with a doctor, Biel (Manu Ríos) being awoken suddenly by his colleague. Biel is told that they’re operating on a woman right now and he hurries off. Meanwhile, the busy hospital is covered in protest signs. A doctor asks for more pamphlets to be handed out and more signs to be put up.
Biel enters the operating theater to find doctors working on a tumor in the patient’s breast. They’re checking the time, 23:51. An argument begins between the female doctor operating and the male attending standing next to her. The female doctor says they need to keep the patient under for two more hours and the boss says stitch her up and leave it.
It becomes apparent that there’s an indefinite strike starting at midnight where the hospital, introduced as the Joaquin Sorolla Public Hospital in Valencia, is completely shutting down in an unprecedented stoppage of services. The argument continues between the two doctors about whether they should stop the surgery and adhere to the strike rules or save the patient. The male doctor asks Biel, “newbie, are you in or out?”
With this, the show cuts to two months earlier, where Biel is seen running through sunny Valencia. He meets his attending, the male doctor from the OR, Dr Moa at the fish market. He’s speaking to a woman who works there and touches her neck, before asking her to come into the hospital, and ordering Biel to take her blood.
It cuts to Sorolla hospital where Rodri, another junior doctor, is seen live streaming on social media - blowing bubbles and talking about standing up for healthcare. Biel shuts him down, and Rodri accuses him of having a crush on Dr Moa. A pregnant female doctor also joins in the conversation with her friends.
A notable patient
Suddenly, an alarm goes off and the team are alerted to a traffic accident - four injured, one pregnant. Rodri is worried as there’s no attendings in the emergency room.
Biel goes to see one of the injured patients who is introduced as Patricia Segura (Najwa Nimri) and Biel knows her. She expresses that she wants to be at a private hospital and asks about Biel’s father, saying he was the best boss she’s ever had. She prompts Biel to grab her breast during her examination and he discovers a lump. He says he’ll get Dr Moa, the best oncologist in Valencia.
Meanwhile, a woman rushes her young daughter through the ER looking desperately for help. She comes across Rodri, recording videos on his phone, and begs him to help her daughter who is having trouble breathing.
A female attending enters and says Rodri is making a video for a child who has cancer, but that he’ll take a look at the woman’s daughter. Rodri says he’s not a pediatrician, but the attending says if he doesn’t look after the girl, the woman will file a complaint. She then says that mum and dad want to talk to him and we learn the female attending is his sister.
While Rodri is examining the girl, he asks about her symptoms and says she looks malnourished and begins questioning the woman on her eating habits and diet. The woman becomes enraged and storms out.
Elsewhere, a male patient is being brought in via an ambulance with his friend. On arrival at the hospital, the paramedic says the pair were taking drugs together. It turns out the man with the patient is a doctor at the hospital, called Quique. The doctor in the ER says Quique is clearly high and must leave. During this altercation, the patient goes into cardiac arrest and they start compressions and manage to successfully stabilize him with the defibrillator.
Elsewhere, the woman from the fish market is speaking to Dr Moa and finds out she is going to die. He’s angry as he had to declare her terminal because she wasn’t given an appointment in time.
Dr Pilar Amaro, the woman from the OR in the first scene, says he is exaggerating. Dr Moa suggests the idea of an indefinite strike to get the government’s attention. Pilar says they’d never strike because patients will die. Suddenly, Pilar’s phone rings and she finds out her son is in the hospital. She rushes through the ER to find her son, Oscar, the patient who came in the ambulance with a suspected drug overdose.
It cuts to Biel, looking at the results of Patricia’s breast scan with Dr Moa which reveals a tumor. We find out that Patricia is in fact the President of the Valencian government and Dr Moa questions why she’d come to a public hospital, if she wants to end them.
Biel and Dr Moa visit Patricia with her results and she says she wants to go to the private hospital, Santa Ana. They explain to her that if she went there and it got worse, they’d send her here anyway and that Dr Moa is the best in oncology.
Intimacy troubles
Rodri returns home to Quique, the pregnant female doctor, and Biel. Rodri tells Quique about Dr Amaro’s son coming into the ER, and Quique panics as he realizes who he brought in earlier that day. He reveals they had been at a chemsex party, taking lots of drugs together, and engaging in unprotected sex.
This leads Rodri to suggest maybe Oscar caught hepatitis from the unprotected sex and that they should test him for STIs. To lighten the mood, Biel says they should go to a karaoke bar and drink.
At the bar, while Biel is on stage singing, a woman catches his eye and they disappear out of the bar to sleep together. Afterwards, she says her boyfriend won’t be too happy. He says he didn’t know that she had one. She asks about Rodri and it turns out she’s his sister from earlier, the attending in the hospital, Jesica.
Back at the hospital, Quique goes to see Oscar and secretly takes his blood so he can run the STI test. Dr Amaro finds him in the hallway ordering the tests, but expresses that she’s looking for the person who gave her son drugs, not realizing that Quique was there.
Patricia is with her team at her house reading social media posts that demand her firing because she was intoxicated when she had the car accident. She accuses the hospital of leaking the information. She receives a text from Biel to say her results are in.
At the hospital, Patricia meets with Biel and Dr Moa and they suggest starting aggressive treatment immediately. She says if she was at the Santa Ana, the private hospital, she’d be in surgery tomorrow. Dr Moa, infuriated, tells her to go there instead.
Public healthcare system under stress
Upon leaving the hospital, Patricia is surrounded by the press asking about the car accident. They ask why she’s at Sorolla hospital, to which she answers she was there to get checked after the accident and they found a lump. She reveals she has cancer, but thanks the public healthcare system for working so quickly and easily.
Seeing her on TV, Dr Moa goes down to speak to the press and tells the truth about how women can’t just come and get screened the way she has, that they’re completely overwhelmed, and they don’t have any capacity because the healthcare system isn’t working at all.
In the hospital, the young girl from earlier is brought in by her older brother unconscious. They give her an MRI and Rodri and his sister, Jesica, look at the results. It reveals her left lung is really bad, potentially cystic fibrosis, but she needs immediate surgery to fit a tube. She asks Rodri to get permission from the mother.
While doctors are praising Dr Moa for what he said on the news, the hospital manager walks in, angry, and says he’s set off a problem and that he should fire him that second if he could, but that Dr Moa would love to go out in a blaze of glory so he won’t. President Segura no longer wants to be treated at the hospital, and he asks Dr Moa to go and apologize. Biel and Dr Moa go to visit the President and offer their help, but she refuses.
Rodri speaks to the girl’s brother and finds out he can’t get hold of his mother to get permission. Jesica comes in asking if they have the go-ahead, and the boy lies and says yes. When Jesica leaves, Rodri agrees to let the boy forge his mother’s signature to do the surgery.
A devastating loss
Quique gets the results for Oscar’s STI test revealing he has gonorrhea, hepatitis, and HIV. Quique says the symptoms don’t match the result though as the hepatitis isn’t affecting his liver yet. Rodri says to Quique, you mentioned he fainted, maybe he hit his head and there’s a brain bleed.
Quique orders a CAT scan that reveals a hemorrhage and at the same moment, Oscar starts to go into hypertension and bradycardia meaning he needs emergency surgery. With the hospital overrun, Jesica and Rodri’s surgery on the little girl is interrupted and they demand Jesica comes to operate on Oscar instead, Dr Amaro’s son, so she leaves Rodri alone to do the little girl’s surgery.
While Jesica successfully operates on Oscar, something terrible happens during Rodri’s surgery. When inserting the tube, blood starts to go everywhere. With Rodri panicking, he doesn’t know what to do and the little girl dies on the operating table. Rodri goes to another room and starts to sob.
All episodes of Breathless are available to stream on Netflix now.
