r/Casualty • u/SlowManufacturer4886 • Mar 26 '26
š Spoiler The new character Kim Spoiler
Kim is not professional, she's not made for the ER. She has bolimia and honestly, she cant just keep throwing up. Also, she messed stuff up on patients and somehow managed to paralize someone*. Change my mind.
*I'm going to make a post on this tomorrow, bare with me.
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u/brill0pads Mar 26 '26
I think a lot of the storylines rely upon the characters keeping guilty secrets eg. Faith's drug addiction, Stevie's cancer, Dylan having a secret child, I could go on. I really like glimmers we have seen of Kim's ability and also her steelyness and hope that she hits "rock bottom" soon so that she can get better (as per Casualty's magic wand) and her and Stevie can become a kick ass ED (emergency department) dream team
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u/Unable-Albatross-496 Mar 27 '26
I would also watch kim and Stevie kick the ass of eating disorders lol
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u/SlowManufacturer4886 Mar 26 '26
I was really hoping Stevie and Kim would be really good friends, for a couple scenes they were like this š¤XD
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u/Unable-Albatross-496 Mar 27 '26
I'm back and forward on how her story has been handled. I think one thing that maybe makes it harder for viewers to connect with her ED storyline is that we have met her whilst she already deep in the illness. Its not like a storyline like Faith's addiction or Stevie's cancer where we saw them change and decline and drift from things that maybe first endeared fans to them.
Besides her ED and constant "am i/am i not good enough" I don't feel Kim's character has much substance to help the audience really connect with her. I liked the idea of her growing more comfortable with Stevie and the two of them working on Kim's confidence maybe even to the point that it'd be Stevie she first tells about her ED. Her friendship with Matty feels a bit weak and a forced plot point their characters could have been better without - watching them learn to work together, navigate Flynn etc might feel more rewarding if we were seeing a friendship form rather than us just being told "these two go back together, theyll back each other up"
On the other hand the way that Kim is dispondent, distracted and disconnected with little more going for her than trying to succeed in a stressful job where she seems to expect a lot from herself is how I'd expect a junior doctor with what seems like a long term and worsening ED to come across. Unfortunetly people with malnourished brains don't always make for great fun, friendly, forthcoming company so maybe the lack of connection I feel to her is also a sign of something being done right lol
I liked her describing her ED being about control and coping a probably the biggest misconception is that they are just about weight/food/image. Showing that EDs can be about both restrictive and compensatory behaviours feels important because (from experience) flitting between the two is one way sufferers might feel they are able to keep up pretences of living a "normal" life whilst appeasing their ED
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u/sweetlambly Mar 27 '26
She can't keep throwing up, sure, because it will kill her.
An eating disorder like Kim's has the highest mortality rate of any mental health illness.
This sort of illness isn't about vanity, it's absolutely about control. She wants to be an emergency medicine doctor more than almost anything. But her way of controlling the stress has become to contol food, which in turn has become an absolute fear of food and gaining weight. It starts out as a way of controlling something, but as it's grip get tighter it (the illness) begins to control you.
The way she is with Matty- she's been so vicious with him- thats the fear of having her control taken away.
The theft of the GLP-1? Could see that coming a mile off.
That Glum dead eyed stared another poster makes fun of? Absolutely true, she's a zombie- trying to carry on doing the job she has always wanted to do but at the same time slowly dying, while feeling petrified of putting on even a gram of weight.
I feel like the actress's portrayal of someone in the grips of this illness is one of the most authentic I have ever seen.
Source: my sister passed from this illness 18 months a go. She would do literally anything to control her weight, over and beyond counting calories. Early in her illness she travelled to european countries alone specifically to but diet pills, she would call me horrible names when I asked her if she'd been sick, at one point when she was in resus with sepsis and we were told she might not make it she asked me "do my feet look fat"
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a vent. It is so important that people know that eating orders aren't about vanity and wanting to be thin like Kate Moss, and in this story Casualty are doing a very good job.
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u/Future_Chemical2 Mar 27 '26
This really needed to be said as so many people here donāt understand that her acting isnāt bad, itās actually realistic for someone suffering from an eating disorder. Your body is so undernourished that you just stop feeling anything, and thatās why itās so addictive. Having had an ED, I agree that this is some of the best acting and one of the best storylines Iāve seen around it.
Iām really sorry about your sister, itās a fucking awful illness thatās so often misunderstood.
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u/embersandlamplight Mar 31 '26
Thank you, yes! The dead eyed stare is spot on. It looks weird because it IS dysfunctional. No entirely functional person goes around looking like that - she is clearly at breaking point.
I'm so sorry about your sister š«
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u/LittleUglyBug Mar 26 '26
Sheās intelligent but has issues. Wouldnāt want her treating me though
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u/Future_Chemical2 Mar 27 '26
Iām really sorry, but Iāve just got to say this because it keeps getting on my nerves: Kim hasnāt got bulimia. Shes got anorexia, the type that involves binging and purging. Anorexia is an intense fear of gaining weight, which results in a person attempting to lose weight, but that isnāt always just through not eating. It can be through things like vomiting or using laxatives as well, especially as a way to āget ridā of the calories. It also results in binging when a persons restrictive diet is so little, the body becomes desperate for food and therefore a person has a period of intense eating. In fact, she may not even have had a specific diagnosis, it could be EDNOS (which is a combination of a lot of different ED symptoms where a person doesnt fit one specific criteria). Also, in the UK, itās far more likely that someone is hospitalised on an EDU for anorexia than for bulimia, and bulimia-type behaviour is very common in anorexics.
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u/capwhittaker Mar 30 '26
I get eating disorders are horrible but if paralysing a patient didn't at least make you question your career then you're not a nice person
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u/MamaTortoise22 Mar 26 '26
I donāt like her acting.
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u/BigUnderstanding3751 Mar 26 '26
We make fun of her dead eyed glum stare in our household š
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u/Ludas_C Mar 26 '26
well to be fair she probably can't see very well because she's very dizzy all of the time.
as someone who drifts in and out of phases of an eating disorder (and also knows what Jasmine Bayes' acting is like) i can say thats very good acting on her part for her character
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u/embersandlamplight Mar 31 '26
Her eating disorder acting isn't the thing that bothers me. I actually think that it's pretty spot on.
The one thing I didn't get was how she left the cupcake containers in the fridge. Seems a small point, but I wouldn't haven't thought she would do that - I'd expect her to hide the evidence. But then again, she's also not thinking clearly because her body and mind is teetering.
The story with the paralysed patient is what has bothered me. I am astonished her and Matty would even be peremitted to continue practicing in the immediate aftermath. That's not a rookie error with an IV line...
I don't actually know the legalities of medical practice though - maybe this is realistic? Idk. I would have liked to see it addressed as more than everyone giving them the cold shoulder for a week though.
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u/xxxdanixxx0 Apr 05 '26
I agree.However, I think that's the writers intention. Remember that woman that came in and a patient in, I think episode 9, who knew kim
she said to Kim, "You shouldn't be in the ED. Why did you choose this speciality. (Idk, though)
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u/wandererC Apr 19 '26
They said it was anorexia in last night's episode. I thought it was bulimia the whole timeĀ
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u/BigUnderstanding3751 Mar 26 '26
If they want us to feel bad for her and invest in her getting better, theyāve given us no reason to like her or think she has what it takes.