Chicago Med Season 10, Episode 12, “In the Wake” picks up where the show left off before the One Chicago crossover — and that’s not a good thing. The episode isn’t quite as melodramatic as its pre-crossover predecessor, but it shares the same bad habit of leaning into the drama above all else. Most of the episode involves bringing up bad things from characters’ pasts, and only one of them has any kind of constructive purpose. In fact, one of them borders on destructive.
“In the Wake” has a main storyline involving Dr. Hannah Asher and nurse Jackie Nelson advocating for a pregnant woman who jumped off a bridge, which prompts the show to bring up Jackie’s previous mental health challenge. Meanwhile, Sharon Goodwin is still having issues that are connected to her stabbing, even though that was three episodes ago. Ironically, the character who ends up looking the best in this episode is Dr. Caitlin Lenox.
Chicago Med Season 10, Episode 12 Scores Lenox Some Points
Could Lenox Replace Crockett Marcel in the Big Picture?
If there’s a hero of Chicago Med Season 10, Episode 12, it’s Sarah Ramos as Dr. Caitlin Lenox. One of the plotlines is that there’s not a proper technician on hand to restock the Emergency Department’s medication, so Lenox tells Maggie Lockwood to give the task to one of the nurses. Maggie delegates it to Doris, despite the fact that Doris is also responsible for four patients. Later in the episode, it’s revealed that Doris mixed up the doses of morphine for two patients — giving a child an adult dose, and vice versa. Lenox wants Maggie fired, but of course Maggie won’t do so, because Chicago Med viewers know that people get away with a lot at this hospital.
What makes this plot point work is that when Maggie points out that Doris should never have been juggling extra work in the first place, Lenox actually listens. For once, she understands what her colleagues are going through without needing some kind of inciting incident to prompt her to be empathetic. There’s also a very interesting possibility that opens up when Lenox says she’ll bring up the nursing issues to the hospital’s board the following week. Audiences may remember that before Dominic Rains left, his character Dr. Crockett Marcel was very involved with the management side of the hospital, which gave Chicago Med a pathway to exploring that part of health care.
If Lenox is also going to be engaging with the board regularly, then that’s a way to reintroduce those kinds of stories in Season 10 and let audiences see a much bigger picture. There are a lot of medical dramas on TV, but what made Chicago Med unique was that it showed a lot of different versions of medicine, including the business angle. It’s narrowed its focus in recent seasons (save the mobile clinic that’s rarely been brought up), so why not take a chance again and give Lenox something else to do?
Dr. Caitlin Lenox is Chicago Med Season 10’s most polarizing figure – but actor Sarah Ramos tells CBR how she feels about playing the antagonist.
Chicago Med Almost Destroys Mitch Ripley… Again
Luke Mitchell’s Character Gets the Short End of the Stick
Conversely, this episode of Chicago Med deserves criticism for what it does to Dr. Mitch Ripley. What happens during “In the Wake,” particularly at the end, is immensely frustrating because it’s the second time that the show has painted Ripley as a “bad guy” purely for the sake of drama. Ripley already spent the first part of Season 10 defending himself from assault allegations — and now he’s actually assaulting a drunk man outside of a bar, although the man takes a swing at him first. What the show wants to communicate is obvious and also cliche: that Ripley is having such a hard time dealing with the death of his friend Sully that he’s lashing out. What message the show unintentionally sends is that it still sees Ripley as angsty and dangerous.
