This is not how people act or behave. I don't mean the protagonist, but the rest of the cast. The entire premise of the episode (and possibly the entire show?) is ridiculous - there is not this level of discrimination against autistic people, in fact a huge number of autistic people ARE surgeons and nobody cares.
To have the board of a hospital get so worked up about the idea of hiring an autistic person, with people saying they don't want to have someone autistic working there (without even meeting him) is ridiculous to the point of absurdity. Never mind the fact it would break multiple discrimination laws, it is not how people behave.
Straight away Shaun finds himself an an unlikely situation where a boy's life needs saving. The whole thing seems surreal and bizarre. It's not realistic. At the end it becomes like one of those memes: "and then everybody clapped". I got second hand embarrassment that somebody wrote this and thought it was good.
The writing was awful in this. There are frequent flashbacks to his childhood, which reveal a bizarrely unrealistic "origin story". It's laid on so thick, so full of cliche.
Freddie Highmore does a decent enough job of playing Shaun, and some of the representation of autism in the episode were good. I feel some of the other casting choices were questionable and put in poor performances (smirking Chuku Modo in particular).
The entire scene of Shaun not being allowed into the hospital was stupid, as were most of the interactions between the rest of the characters. I was continuously thinking "this isn't how people talk or behave".
The show is so badly written, it's difficult to tell whether it's meant to be a serious drama or low quality daytime soap opera. It seems that the writers contrive to make things happen because they want to show it, which makes character motivations nonsensical. It feels like deus ex machina. Nothing unfolds organically, it all feels so made up, almost like a fairy tale. And then they all clapped.
