Pulse: A Storm Inside the Hospital Walls

Netflix’s Pulse, created by Zoe Robyn, opens with a chilling metaphor: a school bus full of teenagers barrels down a rain-slicked Miami highway as the driver insists, “It’s just a little rain.” Moments later, the storm hits — and so does the crash. This opening sets the tone for a series that explores denial, disaster, and the cost of looking away, both in the world outside and within the walls of Maguire Hospital, a level-one trauma center where the real storms are often internal.

At its heart, Pulse is a medical drama in transition — both narratively and thematically. The story follows emergency and surgical residents grappling not only with life-and-death situations, but also with the fallout of a sexual harassment complaint that fractures the hospital’s inner dynamics. Danielle “Danny” Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) accuses her former romantic partner and supervisor, Chief Resident Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), of harassment — a storyline that attempts to depict the harrowing complexity of speaking up in a rigid institutional structure. Rather than sensationalizing, the show makes space for the emotional toll such a report demands: the isolation, the skepticism, and the deep personal cost of seeking justice.

As the hospital weathers a literal hurricane, a new administration arrives — bringing with it promises of reform but also bureaucratic tension. Meanwhile, the team navigates overlapping layers of professional ambition, personal vulnerability, and ethical ambiguity. Romantic entanglements, like those between residents and nurses or between interns and mentors, echo larger power struggles. Social themes — including ableism (through Danny’s sister Harper, a resident in a wheelchair), class disparity, and gender politics — are threaded through the series, though not always with equal narrative weight.

Pulse doesn’t fully escape the clichés of its genre with the uneven pacing and underdeveloped subplots. Still, the show deserves recognition for what it tries to do: depict not only trauma medicine, but the quiet, devastating traumas within the institution itself. In doing so, Pulse reflects a genre attempting to evolve — asking not just how we heal bodies, but how we confront systems that make healing difficult in the first place.