The Red Band Society pilot introduced our main characters, and showed them banding together to face the hardships ahead. Read a full episode recap here.
Narrated by coma patient Charlie (Griffin Gluck), the first episode spends a lot of time introducing us to the main characters.
The episode opener makes you think you’ve accidentally tuned in to Glee: in a high school gym, the bossy cheerleader Kara (Zoe Levin) is leading her team – but then she suddenly collapses, breaking her arm in the process.
This lands her at Ocean Park Hospital’s pediatric ward, in the bed next to Charlie’s (much to his dismay). She begins to smoke cigarettes, blowing the smoke in Charlie’s face; harrassing both Nick (the volunteer who has come to sing for Charlie, played by Thomas Ian Nicholas) and Nurse Jackson (Octavia Spencer), we get the impression that Kara is only there to make life difficult for everyone else.
Nurse Jackson is introduced buying coffee, getting the apparently well-deserved label “Scary Bitch.” She is shown talking to Nurse Gomez-Rejon, played by Wilson Cruz.
The next characters we meet (still via Charlie’s voice over) are the patients Leo (Charlie Rowe) and Dash (Astro). Leo is a cancer patient with an amputated leg, and Dash has cystic fibrosis.
They attend school with fellow child patients, and Charlie points out how the environment around them allows standard social barriers to fall away, so the kids can make friends with people they maybe wouldn’t in the “real world.”
One such connection is shown to have formed between Leo and the cool, artsy girl Emma (Ciara Bravo), who suffers from an eating disorder. But as Charlie explains, their tentative romance was too “real,” and scared them – now, they are intent on making each other’s lives as miserable as possible.
Enter Jordi (Nolan Sotillo), a new patient. He has been treated for cancer in Mexico, but convinces the acclaimed Dr. McAndrew (Dave Annable) to let him transfer to Ocean Park, where his leg will be amputated. Despite the long waiting list, McAndrew gives in, and Jordi is admitted to the hospital – and he is given the spare bed in Leo’s room.
Kara visits Emma’s hospital room because she knows that Emma’s food is of much better quality than her own. She promises Emma cigarettes and diet pills if she gets hungry, very immorally encouraging her eating disorder.
Leo quickly takes Jordi under his wing, and along with Dash they visit the hypochondriac millionaire Ruben (Griffin Dunne), who lives in the hospital because he’s promised to donate his fortune to them when he dies.
Ruben gives them the idea to hold a send-off party for Jordi’s leg. They set out to buy beer, and Jordi is introduced to Emma on the way. Jordi seems instantly smitten with her, and Charlie points out that Emma has seen an opportunity to make Leo jealous.
After buying beer (a total cancer perk, to borrow a The Fault in Our Stars-ism), the boys unfortunately encounter Nurse Jackson, who confiscates their beer.
Kara leaves Emma’s room after being invited to the party, and comes back to her room to find her admirer (a girl from her school) waiting with flowers. Kara insults the girl and tries to send her away, but the girl scathingly tells her that the reason she is there alone is because no one else from the cheerleading squad wanted to come.
This sends Kara into a state of panic, and she collapses on the floor. She passes out, and is transported into what seems like an in between state between life and death. There she meets Charlie, who asks her to tell his father that “it wasn’t his fault.”
Kara wakes up, and we find out that there is a more serious reason for her fainting spells than we might have assumed: she has an enlarged heart, and needs a heart transplant. But since she has been smoking, drinking and taking drugs, she is at the bottom of the list. We see this startling information sink in with Kara, and it looks like it might be the beginning of her character transformation.
The volunteer who sings to Charlie returns, and Kara figures out that he’s actually Charlie’s father. He does not have visitation rights because of his involvement with the accident, so he has to come in disguise. Kara promises not to tell his secret if he’ll buy her beer, which she brings to the roof party.
Once on the room, Kara sends Charlie’s father a text, conveying Charlie’s message.
The party on the roof brings together Kara, Emma, Leo, Jordi and Dash. Leo notices Emma and Jordi sitting close together, while Kara and Dash are talking on the other side. He then gathers them all around him, and introduces the main premise (and title) of the show: the red band society.
Leo gives them all one of his own red bands from his surgeries, explaining what happened during each of the operations and why he is choosing to give them each a particular band.
Later, we see him go to Charlie’s room, putting a band on his arm as well. Leo reveals that, like Kara, he has also seen Charlie in the in between place. When they met, Charlie told him that, “Luck isn’t getting what you want. It’s surviving what you don’t want.”
The night before Jordi’s surgery, the boys bond about having their legs amputated. In the final sequence of the episode we see Jordi being prepped for the operation, but getting up and racing to Emma’s room to place the red band she had lost on her pillow. We also see Kara putting a sign on her window asking for pizza (which Charlie had theorized would wake him up from his coma), and Nurse Jackson sending it over before going home after her shift.
The final monologue from Charlie sums up what we learned in the first episode, and sets us up for what is to come.:”People think that when you go to a hospital, life stops. But it’s the opposite — life starts.”
Red Band Society returns next Wednesday with season 1, episode 2, “Sole Searching.”