Chicago Med is returning from hiatus on Wednesday night with a lot of questions to answer. Moat importantly, perhaps, is Dr. Caitlin Lenox (Sarah Ramos) OK? She did, after all, rush headfirst into danger to help a patient, Faye (Olivia Nikkanen), who was being abused by her husband, Devin Carter (Jack Falahee). The mid-season finale ended with Carter finding Lenox in his house, where she’d gone to check on Faye, and striking her unconscious.
Will Lenox survive? And, if she does, will we ever get to peer into why she decided to take the kind of risk she did? Ever since her prion disease diagnosis, we’ve seen her carefully constructed façade shatter, but there’s being more open, and there’s being more reckless and not caring about your own safety. Where does Lenox stand, and will this experience change her?
But that isn’t the only question. There’s the future of Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram)’s baby, and her relationship with the baby daddy, Dean Archer (Steven Weber). They are ostensibly just two friends having a kid together, but could that relationship turn into more? What about Hannah’s ex, Mitch Ripley (Luke Mitchell)? Is there still something there?
The show has to tackle all of that and another possible love triangle, this one involving two different shows, as Dr. John Frost (Darren Barnet) finds himself in between fellow doctor Naomi Howard (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut) and EMT Lizzie Novak (Jocelyn Hudon). And that’s only what we can anticipate. This show does love to throw curveballs at us.
We talked to Chicago Med showrunner Allen MacDonald about old and new romances, an upcoming episode focused on Dr. Charles (Oliver Platt), where exactly these characters are going next, and if we can expect to see other surprise OG Chicago Med characters show up this season.
You’re probably really glad not to have to answer questions about Hannah’s baby daddy anymore.
Allen MacDonald: Lizzie, it’s Archer. [laughs] It was a relief, actually, when it aired.
So now the question is, have you moved on from the Asher/Archer/Ripley love triangle? Is that settled?
MacDonald: I think it’s settled. I think that right now, the big question is where Asher and Hannah are going to go with this pregnancy and parenting this child together. Their mantra for the season, or for this pregnancy, was two friends having a baby. And so, we understand that they don’t intend for it to become anything more than that. But having a baby is a very emotional thing; it’s a very intimate thing. And these two, I think, have feelings for each other…
Romantic feelings?
MacDonald: Whether they’re in love with each other, or those are romantic feelings… I don’t think they’re easily defined. But they will get the opportunities to explore that with all the various bumps in the road. And I don’t intend to have Mitch in the middle of it.
How worried should we be for Hannah’s baby, on a scale of 1 to 10? Give us a number.
MacDonald: I feel like that’s a trick question. I think I’m gonna go in the middle with a 6.
I feel like in a medical drama, you always kind of have to worry.
MacDonald: That’s totally fair. Because I… I’m not saying I often read the online posts. I’m not saying I look at them all the time, but I am gonna say that when I did look at the posts that there’s a whole conversation about that, especially because on Chicago Fire, Stella Kidd, unfortunately, had a miscarriage. And so, I understand that.
Let’s talk about Ripley. If he’s not in the middle of a love triangle, it feels like he’s a little bit adrift. Where’s he going next? What plans do you have for him?
MacDonald: I think adrift is a good word. And I’m actually going to use that in the writer’s room next time I’m in there, because I say it differently, but I think that captures it. He’s adrift, but I think he knows what direction he wants to move in. I think when he was introduced, we basically saw him introduced as an angry young man. He had some anger from his childhood and his teenage years; he had a bumpy road, but he found his way out of it, and I think one of the issues he had when he was a teenager was a lack of control over his emotions.
That’s how he met Dr. Charles as a teenager when he was in basically juvenile hall or a juvenile detention facility, and that was something that he was able to push down. And I think one of our goals in Season 10 was for that to kind of boil back up, and it did. And it ruined his relationship with Hannah for all intents and purposes.
But because he almost died in that well, and I think that in that death experience, he really walked through the fire, and I think he came out, not to be corny, but reborn on the other side of it. And I think once he survived that near-death experience, he was ready to start over, and I think he came back from that with a real positive attitude. We made a real effort to show that he was in a positive headspace, that he was thankful to be alive, and that he was smiling a lot. Because he could have been dead, and I think with finding out that Hannah was pregnant and then thinking for a second that the baby could have been his, and then it turned out not to be his, I think that he’s kind of settled on wanting to be a family man, a little bit.
You know, get married and have a child, and I think that Sadie represented that for him, and I think she felt that, and something about it felt not right. He was rushing it, he was intimate, and so that’s why she ended the relationship. So, I think when I say he’s moving in a certain direction, it’s that he’s in a healthier mindset for sure. But he’s in a little too much of a rush to get there, and that still undermines any relationship.
But he’s found a new friend in Doctor Frost. Was that something you planned from the beginning, or was that born out of the chemistry between Luke Mitchell and Darren Barnet?
MacDonald: It came naturally from their interactions when they did some scenes together, and then we started to plan it in the writer’s room. That’s so much of television writing. You hear how the actors talk, you hear how the characters talk, you see how people interact, what the chemistry is, what the dynamic is, and then you write to it.
The midseason finale left Dr. Caitlin Lenox in a really bad spot after she went to check on Faye, whom she suspected of being abused, while her husband Devin was at the hospital. What was Lenox’s mindset in that moment? Was she being reckless, was she seeking danger, or was it a combination of both that she doesn’t understand herself?
MacDonald: I think that’s all very observant and on point. I think that she was seeking danger a little bit, because, you know, the prion disease knocked her off her game, basically. And at first, she went back to trying to just push it out of her head, and then I think in the season premiere when she had the story with the two sisters, she kind of got the fragility of life held up really closely to her, and she decided that she wanted to live, and she wanted to experience. She wanted to have visceral experiences. But it’s like a drug. So, every time she has a visceral experience, every time she takes a risk, she needs a bigger risk next time to feel alive. And I think that’s now led her into some dangerous territory.
She didn’t go to Faye and Devin’s house only for that reason. But I think that’s part of it, and I think the other part of it is that she is deeply infuriated that this domestic violence situation has been allowed to continue, and that Faye hasn’t had the courage to walk away from it, and that Devin has continued this behavior that’s only going to get worse, so she had to go out there and stop it.
Do you have any surprises up your sleeve for the rest of the season? You did bring Natalie and Will back this season. There are still a lot more characters who could return.
MacDonald: Let me tell you, keeping Natalie a secret is a credit to a lot of people. Because I was very insistent that the reveal not leak. I wanted the audience to feel genuine surprise. But, to answer your question: I don’t know yet, I’m always trying to bring back some OG characters whenever I can. So, you should expect to see some, but I don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen.
Anything else you can tease about what’s coming?
MacDonald: We are going to have a big Dr. Charles episode that delves into his psychology a little bit, and it’s going to be called “The Book of Charles.” It will be structured the same way as “The Book of Archer.” It is my intention to do one of those episodes every season, and so that’s coming up. It’ll be completely locked in on Charles’s POV, and we will see him in every scene, as well. So, that’s coming up.
Chicago Med’s midseason premiere airs on Wednesday, Jan. 7 at 8/7c on NBC.
