Bad news, Chicago Med fanatics.
After Chicago Med Season 7 Episode 12, the series takes a hiatus until after the Winter Olympics.
That’s going to be a long wait, but at least we got some solid pre-hiatus stories.
Choi’s long-awaited return didn’t disappoint.
Although I can’t wait for him to return to Med full-time and (hopefully!) put Archer in his place, his outside-the-hospital drama with his father was a refreshing change of pace.
This storyline featured Choi at his most vulnerable and explained why he is the way he is.
Choi’s father was also a veteran, and he subscribed even more strongly to the “Vets feel no pain” philosophy than Choi does.
He sneered at Choi’s needing to use a cane, constantly dared his son to fight him, and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong when in reality, he had Stage 4 cancer.
I had to laugh when Choi complained to Charles that his father was too stubborn. It’s to Charles’ credit that he didn’t point out that Choi could just as easily have said those words about the man in the mirror.
Choi’s father’s death was sad, especially since it was preventable–and because he and Choi were so distant from each other that Choi didn’t even know his father was sick.
This story wasn’t so much about Choi reconciling with his estranged dad as saying his final goodbye. When Choi’s dad insisted that his son put snow tires on the car RIGHT NOW, I knew that he wasn’t going to be alive when Choi got back from this pointless errand.
I thought Choi’s father might commit suicide rather than die a slow, painful death, perhaps with Felicia’s assistance. Chicago Med wasn’t explicit about whether or not that had happened, but it was possible.
In any case, the man was proud til the end and didn’t want his son to share in his final, most vulnerable moments, and that was more heartbreaking than the death itself.
I’d have liked more conversations between Choi and Charles about this relationship and Choi’s conflicted feelings about it. However, that scene in front of the jeep where Choi lost it after dropping his keys spoke volumes.
That was easily the most emotional scene of the hour, and Charles barely needed to say a word.
Elsewhere, Chicago Med did the impossible and made a story about an anti-vaxxer entertaining.
Stories like this are often heavy-handed. If you are pro-vax yourself, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making anti-vaxxers into caricatures.
That didn’t happen here. Lisa wasn’t exactly sympathetic, especially when she put her health and her baby’s health at risk because she didn’t want blood that had COVID antibodies in it. But she also wasn’t some cartoon villain who was too stupid or devoid of empathy to take the vaccine.
It helped that the story wasn’t about COVID per se. Lisa didn’t enter the hospital because she had any respiratory distress or other COVID symptoms. Instead, she had pregnancy-related anemia and had fainted, possibly because of low hemoglobin levels.
That alone elevated this story over the typical COVID story. Technically, Lisa became a pandemic victim or at least a victim of Internet conspiracy theories. But that wasn’t this story’s main point.
Instead, it focused on the question of bodily autonomy. The ethics committee agreed that regardless of what Jonah’s lawyer had to say about it, Lisa had the right to make her own medical decisions, including rejecting blood transfusions because of fear of the COVID vaccine.
But at the same time, Lisa’s decisions didn’t just affect her. Her pregnancy could have been at risk because of the fall she suffered, and she might have died in childbirth had she not finally consented to a C-section.
And there was always the chance that she had asymptomatic COVID and had passed the disease onto her baby, too.
Lisa also threw her husband out of her room and refused to let him back in until after the baby was born, so she was getting no input into decisions related to her and her baby’s health.
If Dr. Charles hadn’t been off helping Choi with his situation, someone would have undoubtedly called him in to help evaluate Lisa’s competency. But he wasn’t, and the hospital allowed Lisa to make decisions for herself that her doctors thought were questionable.
It showed a lot of growth on Will’s part that the worst thing he did was ask Lisa if she’d like to bring Jonah back in to discuss her options. Neither he nor Stevie thought for a second about giving Lisa a transfusion and just letting her believe the donor was unvaccinated.
That’s a far cry from where Will began, and Stevie’s also been known to impose her opinions on patients. But now that Lisa’s died, I wonder if either of them will second-guess their decision to follow the rules.
Elsewhere, the transplant team fell victim to a bizarre yet oddly predictable revenge plot.
Maggie: Dylan! Sharon just activated the internal disaster system. What’s going on?
Dylan: I’m not sure, but it seems like Blake’s transplant team has been poisoned.
Maggie: Oh my gosh. Is everyone all right?
Dylan: Nobody’s dead.
I wouldn’t have guessed that Chad was going to try to poison the entire transplant team using fentanyl, but as soon as Marcel realized someone had tampered with the masks, I knew who it had to be.
After all, Marcel had stopped Chad from threatening Blake. Someone should have given security a heads-up that this patient was a bit unbalanced; the way he was talking to Blake and Marcel, I half expected him to pull out a gun to force them to operate on his mother.
Speaking of which, it was only a matter of time before things came to a head with Scott and his former friends.
Tyrell’s upset both about having once been arrested and Scott’s former relationship with Carmen, so it was unsurprising that he lost his temper.
Regardless of his jealousy or history with Scott, his behavior sent up about a dozen red flags. I wonder if later on, it’ll turn out he’s been abusing Carmen for a while, leaving Scott in the precarious position of having to protect her and her son.
Scott also told Maggie that he had been with Carmen first and cheated on her, or at least he let Maggie come to that conclusion. If that’s true, there’s even more to this story, and the whole truth will have to come out sooner or later.
Your turn, Chicago Med fanatics.
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button to share your thoughts on the pre-Olympics finale.
If you missed the episode, watch Chicago Med online right here on TV Fanatic.
Chicago Med airs on NBC on Wednesdays at 8 PM EST/PST. The next new episode will air on February 22, 2022.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
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