Note: This story contains spoilers from “Doc” Season 2, Episode 10.
“Doc” returned from its holiday break with a sobering installment that featured a brutal death, grounding the Fox medical drama after a soapy winter finale.
Episode 10, titled “Chief,” followed the fallout of a cyber attack that leaked one of Amy’s (Molly Parker) therapy sessions and wreaked havoc on the doctors of Westside Hospital, including causing a rift in Michael’s (Omar Metwally) marriage. While the hospital tried to secure their networks, another attack by the hacker — revealed to be intern Hannah’s (Emma Pfitzer Price) brother Charlie (Daniel Gravelle), as revenge for an unfolding mystery between Amy and their father — led to a reboot of the system that put a sick patient at risk and ultimately led to their death.
“I really loved that script. I love when the A and B stories come together,” Parker told TheWrap of the pivotal hour. “It’s one of those episodes that is part of what is so great about ‘Doc.’ It’s not afraid to really go there and be emotional. There’s lots of fun and funny stuff and sexy stuff and clever stuff, but it also goes there.”
As the hacker drama unfolded, Amy and Sonya (Anya Banerjee) treated an unhoused patient with undiagnosed schizophrenia who turned out to have been poisoned by chemicals left in an abandoned home he had sought shelter in. Two teenagers found him and helped get him to the hospital, inadvertently also getting exposed to the chemical and getting sick — one was a young woman, who later arrived at the hospital in a coma being treated by Jake (Jon Ecker); the other was a young man complaining of nausea and vomiting being treated by Hannah.
Amy noticed symptoms that she thought required further testing, but couldn’t act upon them after being shut down by Sonya, Amy’s supervising doctor on the case. The hackers also sent another leak — this time AI-generated, featuring Amy saying terrible things about both her ex-husband Michael and their daughter Katie (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim) — which led to a hospital reboot that delayed testing that helped solve the medical mystery that brought the cases together. But just as they administered the medicine, Hannah’s patient crashed and kicked off an extended sequence where the doctors worked together to resuscitate him with a code blue.
But their efforts were fruitless, as Joan (Felicity Huffman) and team failed to bring the boy back to life and pronounced him dead as Amy and his parents watched from afar.
“That whole sequence was really brutal to shoot. At one point, almost everybody was in tears,” Parker said. “That is hard to do over and over and over again. It was hard on everybody.”
The scenes were shot over a full day, around 12-14 hours per Parker, featuring the meticulous and arduous process doctors take part in to try to bring a person back after their pulse flatlines. With Amy still sidelined due to a brain injury that made her lose eight years of her memory, Joan tasked her with comforting the patient’s panicked parents as Sonya and Jake helped her with the procedure.
By the end of the sequence, which lingered on the code blue longer than your typical medical drama, viewers watched as the doctors pronounced the boy dead — altering the lives of his parents and also every doctor involved.
For Amy, the episode shifted her focus back on regaining her standing as a hospital leader. Her frustration at being benched for the code led to a breaking point, so she pledged to Joan to focus on medicine once again so she could get a shot at chief resident. The incident also helped her regain some memories about the death of her son Danny, which led to a big confrontation with Sonya that showed some of the old Amy’s bad behavior.
“We have seen Amy doubting herself as a doctor. But by the end of this episode, she has had a shift of confidence around her ability,” Parker said. “It’s brought up a whole bunch of really interesting stuff that takes us into the second half of the season around Amy’s ambition.”
Flashbacks also took us back to the beginning of the race that first landed Amy as chief of internal medicine years before her accident, meaning Scott Wolf’s Richard was back in the picture. Viewers learned that the desire to not work under the supervision of a doctor who would make a mistake pushed her to put her name into consideration for the leadership role — after years of not wanting to give too much of herself at work so as to balance being a mother back home.
Parker said the storyline will see Richard sticking around for a bit, but didn’t offer clues as to how it could bring the disgraced doctor back into the fold in the present day. Wolf also directed an episode in the second half of Season 2, which will air later this year.
And viewers would be right to worry about the episode’s final moments, which saw Katie listening to the AI-generated recording she received from the hacker as her mom, in which she said Danny was her favorite child and denigrated their relationship. Parker said upcoming episodes feature a difficult storyline for the titular doc’s teenage daughter.
“We’re going to learn that she has actually been struggling in a way that was previously unknown to Amy and Michael. We’ll start to see ways in which Katie takes after her mom,” the actress teased. “Feelings take their toll, if you don’t deal with it, it deals with you.”
“Doc” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox and stream the next day on Hulu.
