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“Emily Owens, M.D.” recap: “The King and Lionheart” (1.13)

Writing this last Emily Owens recap ever feels so bittersweet and weird that I don’t even know what to say about it so let’s just jump right in to avoid the awkwardness.

We begin with some Relationship Processing, with Emily trying to work out her feelings about The Micah Kiss with Tyra, and Cassandra telling Will, “Whatevs, we all cool, dude.” The Emily and Tyra conversation is lovely because it’s Emily and Tyra, duh, and also it takes place in a super perfectly-cozy coffeeshop, straight up Stars Hollow style. Emily appears to be kind of excited about the kiss but mainly flustered and confused because she was so blinded by her Will Feelings that it all truly shocked her, and whatnot. But this line of thought is interrupted by a mentally ill woman blustering into the coffeeshop and yelling at people and then dramatically passing out. Thank goodness there are two doctors at hand! The lady wakes up just long enough to scream at Emily that she’s not going to any damn hospital. The next time we see her, she’s at the damn hospital, and she wakes up just long enough to throw a bunch of water on Emily. Ha!

As Emily attempts to pat the water off of her shirt, she runs into Micah, who pulls her aside to have A Talk, which is interrupted by Will wanting to have A Talk with her, too. Will, Will, Will. After Micah rushes off to a patient, Emily does at least tell Will about the her and Micah feelings so he doesn’t rush right out with admitting his own Emily feelings, which he is clearly suddenly having now that Cassandra has dumped his ass. Jesus Christo, feelings overload up in here!

We then meet the rest of our patients for the episode, all of which are acutely heartbreaking in their own way: We have the crazy lady from the coffeeshop, whose portrayal I did feel slightly worried about as becoming, well, just a crazy lady. A nurse does refer to her as such. Mental illness that comes wrapped in a package of excessive nastiness can be hard for folks to deal with. But as her erratic behavior becomes more clear, and Emily gets some more personal history from the woman’s daughter, she finally believes a psych eval is warranted, along with blood tests. You think? We also meet a man with a brain thingie who needs surgery, whose ex-wife wants to help comfort him, but he doesn’t want her help because their son died a year ago by choking on a piece of a toy while she was out of the room and he blames the death on her. Yay? And then last but not least, we have lesbians! Specifically, an older lesbian couple who are preparing for a bunch of their college kids returning home this weekend and they are super sweet and adorable and the best and OBVIOUSLY THEIR DOOM LOOMS. Lesbian #1 just has a nasty cough; Cassandra and Will are their doctors and after her heart seems normal in an EKG, they prescribe some antibiotics for pneumonia and send them on their way. CLEARLY THEIR DOOM IS EVER MORE IMMINENT. Cassandra wheels Lesbian #1 out to their car, and she tries to get the dish on Cassandra and Will’s breakup. Cassandra shows her real human heart as she likes to do once in a while, and with an escaped tear, admits that she thinks he’s in love with someone else. Lesbian admits that one time she and Lesbian #2 broke up; she went through a depression and eventually just had to ask for her back, and it worked out okay for them. Cassandra smiles; Lesbian #1 grasps her arm and says so earnestly, “Thank you for everything,” as if she and Will have just saved her life instead of prescribing some antibiotics. And then, of course, of course, five minutes after the lesbians drive off, Lesbian #2 rolls back up to the ER entrance, screaming for help. Lesbian #1, so comforting and happy to Cassandra just moments before, has suddenly passed out and doesn’t have a pulse. Will, who has become closer to the lesbians than he does with most his patients, at least more than we ever see, tries to revive her for 25 minutes. Finally, he admits defeat. EVERYTHING IS RUINED I HATE EVERYTHING JUST STOP.

In a weak attempt to run away from this heartache, let’s get back to good feelings. So, how about that Emily and Micah! They get to finish their conversation from the beginning of the episode, wherein they are both stupidly sweet and Emily is all, “I need to think this through, because you’re my boss, and did I mention you’re my boss?” But she is smiling and talking in her soft, lovable voice even more softly and lovably than normal and they agree to meet at lunch to really talk it out and I love Emily so much right now?

Your face!

Will, meanwhile, has been reeeeal awkward the whole episode around Emily about this Micah stuff, to the point where he eventually pulls the, “Well, it’s just weird to picture you with someone, because I never viewed you as a true emotional human being before,” line. Eyeroll. At least we get this amazing Tyra look when she witnesses this extreme awkwardness at one point. And while we didn’t get any Bandari this episode (No. Bandari. On the last episode! GUH.), we did get screen time with my second favorite woman on this show: Micah’s mom! She’s been accepted into some cancer trial treatment thing. Micah says, Yay! Micah’s mom says, Oh, honey. Just let me die. She has accepted her fate to the point where we learn she has called Micah’s sister, who we’ve never heard of before but who they both joke about being a mess, so clearly I am going to love her and I do! When she arrives at the hospital, she runs on screen to immediately start smacking the hell out of Micah. Which I love! Girl be pissed, because she apparently had no idea about her mom’s condition, and Micah heeded their mom’s desires to not let her know. That IS pretty messed up, yo. Additional relevant information: sister is beautiful. Finally, Micah and Emily meet in the records room for lunch and lay down on the ground and tell stories about their families like you do, and then they prop themselves up on their elbows and both essentially say, OK. We’re into this. There’s been no awkwardness at all between them this episode as I thought there might be, as there often is post-first-kiss on shows; it’s just been all warm and adorable and I am into this too, guys!

Warm fuzzies aside, when it comes to resolution for our patients, there are a number of interesting outcomes:

1) “Crazy lady” actually has a rare infection that she got from cat feces. Because she is also a hoarder and has lots of cats, obviously, which all started along with her schizophrenic behavior when her daughter got her her very FIRST cat, after she left home, so her mom wouldn’t be lonely. When Emily shares this news with her and her daughter, hoarder lady says, heartbreakingly, “So…it’s not my fault?” NO. NO, WORLD. MENTAL ILLNESS IS NEVER YOUR FAULT.

2) Guy with the brain surgery comes out OK, minus the fact that he also had some memory loss, which magically allows him to forget that he ever even had a son, but remember that he did, in fact, love his wife. Emily and Will feel that they can’t break the news to him that he has a dead son he doesn’t remember, so his ex-wife does it for them. He asks, “Are you OK…living with that?” She says, crying, “You never asked me that before.” This is a completely ridiculous storyline, but one that I suppose MUST be medically plausible (right?), and let’s be honest, one that my weepy heart enjoys because the ex-wife has such a sympathetic, glowing face that I want to caress, and can you even imagine losing a child and then losing your partner, who blames you for it? And living that way for a year? No, no, you can’t. So, yay for mind altering brain surgeries, amIright?! 3) Because we always need to twist the knife even deeper into lesbian hearts, Cassandra discovers that Will messed up on Wonderful Dead Lesbian’s file. She in fact had a rare heart thing, and the type of antibiotics Will prescribed with such a rare heart thing causes the heart to stop. As it did. After Cassandra tells Will this, she says that he has to keep it a secret obvs, for his career, and he’s like, “Huh?” and his jaw clenches into this horrible pain and while I’m not a Will fan, I do have to say that Justin Hartley‘s acting on this episode has been great. Or, more accurately, Justin Hartley’s jaw has been great. He doesn’t heed Cassandra’s advice, and tells both hospital administration and then Surviving Lesbian about it, just as she’s about to get on the elevator with her dead wife’s clothes. He’s so shaken up by it he even takes off his glasses to tell her. She says: “I, uh–the children are coming. I have to get home to the children.”

Lessons from this episode: you can get a horrible disease from cats and one day your wife will die from medical malpractice. THANKS FOR KICKING LESBIANS ON THE WAY OUT, EMILY OWENS.

(Only kidding a lil’; seeing a lesbian couple portrayed as loving and healthy and as completely valid parents of a large, “normal” family was so great.) On the one hand, I know it’s good to be honest, but at the same time, admitting this to her, as normally happens when admitting horrible things, only serves to make Will feel better, and make Surviving Lesbian feel worse. Imagine not just losing your long time wife, but knowing that she didn’t have to die? At the same time, I know it was ethical of Will, blah blah. I don’t know. Will really seems to be the captain of sharing his emotions when he maybe shouldn’t, such as when he and Emily then go to the bar afterwards. I get them going to the bar together, because he went through this really awful day and needs to decompress and she still cares about him so it fits her character to be there for him. But then he basically admits that he has feelings for her even though it’s bad timing being that she’s finally coming around to Dreamboat Micah and she’s like, “Yeahhh, bad timing,” and awkwardly leaves the bar, taking that wallop of emotions home with her.. And then at her apartment there’s a knock on the door, and Will’s face shows up once again, looking particularly in need of desire and sex this time. Without saying a word, he comes in and Emily’s sort of like, well, okay, guess this is finally happening now, all while Of Monsters and Men plays in the background and breaks my heart.

OK, OK, thoughts and feelings! I hate that this was the way this series ended. Obviously. But if it makes you feel better, creator Jennie Urman tweeted her thoughts after the episode about what would have happened if she could have finished the full story arc in 22 episodes as she had originally planned.

So this definitely made me feel better, as it’s clear that I am #TeamMicah all the way. And it is true that Emily probably didn’t give herself enough time to process “getting over” Will. I mean, four years is a long time to pine, y’all. You can’t make those feelings go poof, however much you believe you can! She had even admitted this to Tyra earlier in the episode. So this storyline makes sense, it’s just tough having that be how it ended for us as viewers. I want her and Micah to have lots of babies so that that sister we just met can be the best, sassiest, most frazzled aunt ever! And OMG, crazy sister and Tyra totally should have had sex! Le sigh.

I also asked Jennie Urman if she had any plans for the near future now that Emily Owens has met its end, and she said she’s about to pitch another idea as we speak. I wish her all the best, and hope good things continue to come for her: we need all the female writers and producers out there, writing smart and funny female roles, as we can get.

And to leave with one last warm fuzzy, Aja Naomi King, who played Cassandra, also tweeted this picture of her “family,” as they watched the last episode air together, proving that Kelly McCreary dresses just as wonderfully in real life as Tyra did. Thanks for watching with me, AfterEllen readers. Here’s to hoping we get more lesbians of color on our TV screens to watch, and soon. And more of Mamie Gummer wouldn’t be bad, either.

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