Abhiroop Das
Developed by Barbie Kligman, Fox’s ‘Doc’ follows Doctor Amy Larsen, one of the top doctors at Westside Hospital, whose life completely changes following an accident. With nearly eight years’ worth of memory wiped out from her mind, Amy has to restart from the ground up, even if all the relationships in her life have altered drastically. The previous episode ended with Hannah hacking even deeper into Amy’s personal files and ultimately landing on the goldmine that is her therapy recordings. However, with each one of her schemes essentially gambling with patients’ lives, the consequences of these actions are bound to come calling sooner than later. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Amy Being Hacked is Now a Hospital-Wide Issue
‘Doc’ season 2, episode 10, begins with a strange nighttime delivery at Westside Hospital, where doctors respond to a car dropping off an injured man before racing out of sight. The following day, we return to our familiar faces, starting with Michael, who appears to be having troubles with Nora. It is implied here that Hannah leaked Amy’s private therapy conversations to Nora of all people, specifically clipping the section where Amy talks to Gina about rekindling a relationship with Michael. Although he tries his best to diffuse the situation, Nora has no plans on getting back together with him any time soon. Elsewhere, Amy and Jake have seemingly resumed their relationship, but there’s still a long way to go for them to bridge their differences.
At the hospital, Amy, Michael, and Joan discuss the hack and how it has put every odd thing surrounding Amy the past few days in an entirely new light. Knowing that her credibility has been restored, Amy seeks to resume her memory retrieval therapy, as she believes that the man she sees in her dreams is the key to the mystery. Joan, however, remains wary of Amy’s undeniably alarming symptoms and instead places her under Sonya’s supervision for the day. Meanwhile, Hannah’s brother is at risk of being caught for the hack, but has a plan to infiltrate the system with a phishing link and then cause a temporary outage to wipe their tracks clean.
A Patient With Schizophrenia Causes a Difference of Opinion
Amy and Sonya’s patient of the day is the injured man from the start of the episode, who is revealed to be a homeless man with a mental health condition. The man, paranoid about everything around him, says that his name is Tim and that he last saw his family near Cedar Lake. Amy and Sonya clash about the correct medical approach to this patient, as the former believes in digging through his past, while the latter intends to treat his immediate physical injuries first. Elsewhere, Jake and TJ tend to a teenage patient, named Shannon, who is in a coma for no immediately discernible reason. While TJ claims that she has come out clean for most drug test results, a deeper search is yet to be done, and yet Shannon’s mother is confident that her daughter doesn’t do drugs.
Amy takes it upon herself to identify the man, and with Cedar Lake serving as a landmark, she gets help from the authorities to identify the man as Tim Olsen, who went missing seven years ago, and has been assumed dead for four months at this point. From there, the story cuts to a flashback to Amy’s past prior to her accident. Walking down the hall with Joan, she laments working with doctors whom she deems inferior. Joan, on the other hand, suggests that Amy apply for the position of Chief of Medicine, as that is one way to wield her status as the most competent doctor at the hospital. In the present, we see her keen instincts on display yet again, as she notices that Tim’s CO2 rates are spiking abnormally, resulting in a crackling-like effect in his lungs. Sonya, however, doesn’t think much of this development and opts for a blood sample test to examine this instead of a quicker body scan.
At the same time, Tim’s wife, Beth, enters the room, having been informed by the authorities that her husband is alive. While she has to exit soon enough due to Tim’s paranoia flaring up, we do get a glimpse into his past. It is revealed that he is a father, and this entire time, Beth has been battling accusations of his running away to avoid responsibility. Back at Shannon’s case, Jake and TJ confirm that she had been drinking the night she got sick, but the possibility of her drink being spiked cannot be confirmed or denied just yet. This sends Shannon’s mother panicking, but Jake helps her regain composure and instead redirects her to ask Shannon’s friends for updates. At the same time, the new hack takes effect, and Michael is the first to know of it from the IT department.
Three Different Cases at Westside Turn Out to be Connected
Two new recordings have been mailed from Amy’s account to Jake and Katie, and while Michael gets them unsent soon enough, this is still a major lapse. What he doesn’t know, however, is that both those recodings are AI-generated, and the break-in’s real purpose is to glitch the system for just long enough to erase the hack’s metadata. The temporary glitch has an unintentional side effect, in that all medical test results are no longer reliable. When Amy returns to Tim’s room to get another sample, she only notices that his symptoms are flaring up. Still, Sonya has no intentions to get him downstairs for a full body scan, and aggressively reminds Amy of the hierarchy in place. This becomes Amy’s tipping point, and she quits the case in frustration. Elsewhere, Hannah visits a patient named Chris, the driver we saw at the start of the episode, who has been exhibiting nausea and unease.
When Amy comes to the ICU to confirm that Shannon likely wasn’t assaulted, but did have a sexual relationship recently, she notices the same CO2 spike patterns as Tim’s and immediately makes the connection. This time, Jake agrees with her deduction and asks Sonya to run a body scan targeting the patient’s lungs. At the same instant, Shannon’s mother finds on social media that Shannon’s friend is admitted to Westside with similar symptoms, and this turns out to be none other than Chris. With the cat now out of the bag, he reveals that he and Shannon are in a relationship, and used to sneak out to an abandoned house. Last night, they encountered a homeless man trapped under a beam and quickly dropped him off at the hospital before leaving. Thus, it is likely that all three of them have the same disease, originating from the house.
Hannah’s Hacks Go a Step Too Far
TJ joins a health inspection team in combing through the house, and finds a bag of copper sulphate, quickly realizing that the compound likely got into their lungs. While the treatment is almost instantaneously effective, its application has its risks, and we see that firsthand in the case of Chris. While Tim and Shannon show signs of recovery, Chris flatlines almost instantly, bringing Amy, Joan, and everyone else on the roster to gather together for chest compressions. When that doesn’t work out, Joan authorizes a host of other methods, but all end in failure. After a full thirty minutes of chest compressions yielding no results, everyone in the room realizes that there’s no hope left. A tearful Hannah calls the time of death for the first time in her life, bringing one of the cruelest cases on ‘Doc’ to a close.
Amy is furious at Chris’s death, in no small part due to the flashbacks she uncovers of when she heard of her own son’s passing. She believes that Sonya’s ego got in the way of her medical judgment, and the latter can hardly bring herself to disagree. Mirroring the scene from years ago, Amy vents to Joan how she deserves to be the hospital’s Chief of Medicine, but that comes with its own baggage, one neither of them is prepared to unpack yet. Amy is completely broken by the case, especially after learning that the glitch caused by the hack is what delayed treatment, directly causing her patient’s death. Given just how guilty she feels, the hacking saga has likely reached its end, and Hannah is likely on track to confess to the crime herself.
Read More: Who is Hannah Clark? Who Plays Her in Doc Season 2?
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