As Chicago Med nears the end of its season, Dr. Hannah Asher is nearing her due date. Thus far, the OB-GYN’s pregnancy has been plagued by anxiety-fueled nightmares and a scary (but temporary) complication when the doc was exposed to a deadly chemical weapon in March’s crossover event. So can viewers expect the birth of Hannah and Dr. Dean Archer’s child to be just as dramatic and intense?
“All I can say to that is it’s One Chicago, and I would refer to past pregnancies,” showrunner Allen MacDonald tells Soaps.com. “I can’t disclose exactly what’s going to happen. But I will say that it’s going to be very stressful for Hannah and the audience.”
And it’s not just the safety of Hannah and the baby that fans potentially have to be worried about. There’s also the question of what’s going to happen between the co-parents, who, despite continuing to claim they’re just friends, clearly don’t have purely platonic feelings for each other. Dean appears to have come to the realization that he loves Hannah, but he’s currently dating oncologist Dr. Kingston. Meanwhile, Hannah’s dad told her that Dean is in love with her, but she hasn’t talked to him about that revelation.
As the baby’s arrival nears, “it’s going to force them to confront their feelings — or at the very least, one of them will have to confront their feelings,” MacDonald previews.
While the pair decided early on to raise their child as just co-parents, “it was more Hannah deciding than Dean that they were going to be two friends having a baby,” MacDonald notes. “They had a one-night stand that they absolutely did not regret. But they decided in a conversation we didn’t see the next morning that they wanted to remain friends, and that is what they’ve been doing.”
But keeping their relationship non-romantic has not been quite as easy as Dean and Hannah thought it would be. “I think, at times, each of them have had a rise in feelings and emotions in their feelings for the other at different points in the season, but it never seems to match up, time-wise, that they both feel that way at the same time,” MacDonald says.
Now it’s time for Hannah and Dean to face the truth about their situation: “I think that they kind of have been trying to convince themselves that this baby will not catalyze a confrontation between them about how they feel [about] each other. But as complications arise as we get closer to the birth, confronting those feelings becomes unavoidable, especially for one of them,” MacDonald reveals.
Chicago Med airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on NBC, with the season finale scheduled for May 13.