Plot Structure (Coma) Coma
Quadrant: Better tools, sufficient — classical comedy / redemption arc inside a paranoid-thriller surface.
Initial approach: Work the institution from inside. Gather evidence, present it up the chain, trust the playbook surgical residents are trained in.
Post-midpoint approach: Trust no one inside the building. Get the physical proof at the source. Go around the institution to outside authority.
Equilibrium. Hospital rounds and the operating room. Susan moves through morning rounds and scrubs in, calling for sponge at the table.b2 Competent third-year resident in her stable mode, inside the institution she trusts.
Inciting Incident. The ICU corridor. A colleague tells Susan that Nancy Greenly — in for a routine D&C, Susan's friend — is brain-dead.b8 b10 The disruption tailored to the one person Susan knew outside the hospital power structure.
Resistance / Debate. Susan reading Nancy's chart with Mark over her shoulder, finding the unexplained tissue-typing slip, refusing to wait for the lab to reopen.b11 The hesitation between treating Nancy's death as isolated tragedy and treating it as a question to investigate closes here.
Commitment. The computer room. Susan gets the lab tech to run an unauthorized query and walks out with a printout: 240 coma cases over twelve months, ten of them young and healthy.b12 The bounded scene where Susan crosses from asking the institution for an explanation to building her own case against it.
Rising Action. The institutional approach at full throttle. Susan confronts Mark with the printout and gets the wife-someday brush-off;b13 she watches Sean Murphy go into coma the same way Nancy did;b17 she's summoned to Harris's office and ordered into psychiatric evaluation;b15 b16 she defies him by going to Dr. George's lab to demand the charts;b18 she sits in the pathology room while Jim and the resident cheerfully work out that carbon monoxide is the perfect murder weapon — odorless, traceless, undetectable post-mortem.b21 The playbook used as designed: ask the institution and the institution answers.
Escalation 1. Kelly the maintenance worker, in the basement, tells Susan to meet him that night.b28 The independent witness inside the building, willing to talk, willing to meet — the institutional approach's last best hope of an answer from someone other than Harris or George.
Midpoint. Vince electrocutes Kelly in the basement before Susan can reach him.b29 The institutional approach loses its only independent witness; the conspiracy now knows Susan is investigating and is willing to kill to stop her. From this scene forward the question is no longer whether the institution can be asked the right way — it is what Susan will do once she understands the institution will kill to protect itself.
Falling Action. Mark's phone call to Harris from the kitchen while Susan rests in the next room: he came back; she's here now; he'll keep her here. Then the immediate pivot back through the doorway with tea.b34 The partner who said "I believe you" minutes earlier has called the chief of surgery to report her location — the institutional approach collapses completely. Susan flees the apartment, finds a phone booth, calls the residents' exchange and hangs up rather than give her location.b35 She returns to Jefferson on the scheduled tour day, slips off from the tour group, and finds the door she is not supposed to find.b36 b37 Behind it: the organ market in session — bids on a heart at $75,000, kidneys at $200,000, "good old George has the connections."b37 The new approach in execution: get the physical proof at the source.
Escalation 2. Jefferson security on the monitor orders Susan taken alive.b38 She hides among the suspended bodies in the main care facility, then climbs onto the roof of the departing ambulance carrying organs to the Dallas flight.b38 b39 The post-midpoint approach under maximum physical pressure — the only cover is the inventory.
Climax. OR 8 intercut with the basement. Harris over Susan's strapped, drugged body with the scalpel; PVCs hit; in the basement Mark follows her voiceover-replayed route to the gas line and smashes it. "She's okay, sir."b42 The bounded intercut sequence where the post-institutional approach is tested at maximum stakes and holds.
Wind-Down. Recovery. Susan groggy on the gurney mumbles about the operation; Mark says "I know, baby." Two anonymous police officers wait in the corridor outside OR 8 for Harris.b43 The new equilibrium is the smallest possible image of restored authority — the state finally arriving at the door the institution kept closed.