2057 (TV Series) - The Body

The Body

The first episode, "The Body", predicts medical advances from robotic surgery to flying ambulances. The show's presentation plot shows a man falling out of a window (from tripping over a Roomba) on to the street below, and being cared for in a futuristic hospital.

The surgeons discover that his out of date artificial heart has been damaged in the three-story fall. A heart that is completely compatible with the patient is "printed" using an ingenious device that combines the biology of building new organs and the technique of computer printers. Before the surgery can take place, the hospital finds an abnormality in his urine samples. The samples that were taken from the hospital did not match the ones that the toilet in his home analyzed that morning. The man was previously insured with a premium policy, which was canceled when the hospital discovered he had been using clean urine samples to hide the fact that he had been drinking. Insurance policies generally raise premiums when they discover clients use alcohol, and people hide this fact with clean urine samples.

Once the insurance company analyzes the data and discovers that the patient tried to essentially scam them, his policy is immediately dropped. He is placed in the non-insured ward of the hospital, and his expensive surgery is canceled. The only person to come to his aid is a crafty female surgeon who performs the operation anyway. By tricking the system into thinking that a deceased patient with a premium policy is still alive, she is able to perform the surgery using the deceased patient's insurance policy. She then tells the system that the deceased patient died two days later, making it look like they died on the operating table during the surgery that she actually performed on the fall victim.