The Chicago Med Season 11 premiere gave fans much to celebrate — well, some of them.
Wednesday’s episode began with a near-direct pickup of Season 10’s bait-and-switch cliffhanger, which saw Hannah ready to start spreading the news of her pregnancy. But it was unclear whether the father would be Ripley or Archer. All we knew was that Hannah had knocked on Archer’s door to tell him something — either to share a secret with a friend, or reveal the big news to the man who impregnated her.
Turns out, it wasn’t a misdirect at all: Archer is a Chicago Med daddy! (Well, daddy-to-be.) How did Steven Weber react upon first learning the big news? “I still got it!” he told TVLine.
“It’s exciting,” he continued. “I think it’s gonna give some of the fans what they want, it’s gonna freak some of the fans out.” Weber added that he thinks the storyline is a “smart approach” and is delivering all the things people love about the series: an unsentimental, unpredictable challenge for our beloved Gaffney docs.
And to all the #Rashers out there who so desperately ‘ship Ripley and Hannah, showrunner Allen MacDonald had his own message to share: “As a writer, I just felt the connection between Archer and Hannah just ran deeper than the connection between Ripley and Hannah.”
He added: “Speaking honestly, in a lot of ways, last season Ripley was a little bit of a manchild.”
Once the premiere makes its big reveal, the series jumps ahead three months, where Hannah is keeping her pregnancy a secret at work. But a nurse eventually overhears Archer and Hannah discussing it, and misunderstands the situation. Believing Hannah and Ripley are the ones expecting a baby together, she congratulates Ripley on the good news. (Oops!)
Ripley later confronts Hannah in the elevator, also now believing that he is a father-to-be. Hannah has to tell him that the baby is actually Dean’s. He’s a bit taken aback, and shares how for the last few hours, he thought he was going to be a dad, and it surprised him how much he wanted that.
Elsewhere in the premiere, Dr. Lenox is refusing to face the reality of her Season 10 diagnosis of the rare prion disease, Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS). She begins treating two sisters who have found themselves intertwined after a roof collapses at an all-night rave. (Like, literally intertwined; one of the girl’s arms is stabbing right through the other girl’s spleen!)
Dr. Lenox tells the girl — the one with an arm in her stomach — that her chances of survival are only 50/50. This causes Lenox and Abrams — and later the sisters themselves! — to butt heads about the difference between being honest and being emotionally brutal with patients. To make up for her egregiously bad bedside manner, Lenox shares her diagnosis with the girls, explaining how she empathizes with them in her own way and wants them to be able to make use of the time they have left.
The girl with the wounded stomach ends up crashing during surgery, and is nearly pronounced dead. But, fueled by her own sense of urgency to survive, Lenox refuses to stop resuscitating. After more than 18 minutes, the girl comes back. She survived, perhaps bringing some hope to Lenox that she might do the same?
Later in the episode, the pregnancy news starts to weigh on Archer in surprising ways. After collapsing during a long surgery, he has to face the facts: He’s no spring chicken! He feels insecure about his maturity — especially after hearing that Hannah finally told Ripley the news, but only after being cornered by him. Archer worries she’s embarrassed to be having a baby with a 65-year-old man.
Archer and Hannah go on to share a vulnerable exchange about their fears over the future in a moment so tender, we can’t help but wonder: Are these two falling in love?
“He’s not a guy that trusts love,” Weber said. “He’s found a real safe space with Hannah that he might think is love ’cause he’s had a rough go of it, so I don’t know. It certainly throws a wrench into the works and challenges his sense of what being a mature male is in this world.”
If Archer and Hannah aren’t a sure-thing, does that mean there still could be a future for her and Ripley?
“I think she’s just thinking about this baby, to be honest,” MacDonald said. “Never say never, but I don’t think that Ripley and Hannah are an ideal match.”
