Doctor Odyssey is the show that keeps on giving far more than we could have asked for. It may seem impossible that this cruise trip fever-dream medical drama is even capable of pulling off a new surprising twist — how do you deliver a genuine shocker when everything is cuckoo bananas? By going old school. On Thursday’s episode, the series performed a classic soap-opera maneuver when Max “Dr. Odyssey” Bankman (Joshua Jackson) made a brief trip home to visit HIS TWIN BROTHER, ALSO PLAYED BY JOSHUA JACKSON. Double our pleasure, double our fun!
In “Crew Week,” Max takes some time off the boat to visit family. He pulls up to a neat little house in the suburbs with a white-picket fence, and who should open the door but another Joshua Jackson, this one with wavy hair and a quarter-zip. The two greet each other with a hug, showing off the series’ cutting-edge duplicative Josh special effects. Once inside, the twin’s homely wife greets Max, saying, “Who is this man who looks just like my husband but tan and handsome with a much better haircut?” Also, his twin brother, named Merrill Bankman, has twin daughters.
Twin reveals are the sort of trope we’re used to seeing on soap operas like All My Children, The Bold and the Beautiful, and General Hospital, so it’s a delight to see it deployed on a contemporary big-budget primetime series. It’s another instance of Doctor Odyssey acknowledging its own absurdity as a sort of freeing force, allowing it to get more playful than most other programs. And Jackson seems like he’s having a blast playing the schlubby suburban-dad version of Max (with body-doubling by Tyler Cook). The real highlight, however, is when the twins toss the ol’ pigskin back and forth in Merrill’s living room; Jackson playing catch with himself is basically the show going, “Hey! Look over here! It’s the magic of television!”
So besides the obvious fun factor, why do an identical-twin reveal this far into the season? How does it serve the plot? The reveal can be read two ways. If we’re taking Doctor Odyssey at face value, Max’s happily settled, suburban twin is a symbol of what his life could be. It’s especially poignant after last week’s reveal that Avery (Philippa Soo) is not pregnant. It also opens the door for Merrill to return, as Max invites him and the family to be his guests aboard the Odyssey.
The second reading — if you subscribe to the popular theory that the whole show is taking place in some sort of purgatorial dream realm while Max is in a coma due to being Connecticut’s COVID patient zero — is that Max’s shore leave is him reckoning with his real self; the twin is him, the family is his own, and this is the life he left behind. At one point, Merrill tells Max, “I know you better than you know yourself.” Do they have to spell it out for you?
Whatever the reality of Doc Odd’s twin may be, it’s just another example of the show being unlike any other TV offering currently airing. If Doctor Odyssey can pull off an identical-twin reveal, then this show truly can do anything, and I would love to see at least another season’s worth of this sort of fabulousness.
