Reasons for the season this week, meaning, of course, the Emily Owens Season: Hot. Molly. Also, Bandari’s sternum. And then some bros take up space, too, but we can just ignore that part.
We start this week with a dream from inside Emily’s head: the gang’s taking shots at the bar, and Peanuts Guy comes back to apologize for their weird date and see if it could work out again. Also, Tyra is wearing a kickass shirt! Then Will rudely pulls Emily away from Peanuts Guy by her arm and says, you’re right, I AM jealous. And then they go to kiss, and thank God this was a dream because Emily, if Will even seems like sort of a jerk in your head, this is not a good sign! Maybe that seemed valiant to you, but really, it was jerky!
Morphing into real life at the hospital, we meet our patients for the week: first, an adorable young man with severe cystic fibrosis. Until he can get a new pair of lungs, his body is wracked with the type of violent, painful coughs that make everyone in the room uncomfortable. While Cassandra and Emily are working with him, Cassandra seems to be acting strangely, a little timid and quiet and generally un-Cassandra-like. We’re later reminded that her own brother had cystic fibrosis and also went through a lung transplant, which seems like one of the scariest of all the transplants.
We’re also briefly introduced to a extremely bloody emergency patient, accompanied by his equally bloody and extremely distressed wife, whose dire condition we get to assess briefly before he dies. What accident must he have been in? Why did he die? Who knows! Emily shows compassion for his still-bloody-but-now-deflated wife for just long enough for us to learn that he’s an organ donor. A-ha, now we get it. Boy’s gonna get his lungs! Bandari then puts Emily on some “nothing cases” to cover for some missing doctors, which obviously means that at least one of these suckers is going to be anything but “nothing”! Meet a sweet diabetic old woman who’s having such normal symptoms as migraines and swelling. She’s also a psychic, and pulls out some cards to foresee Emily’s future, which includes something about a romantic house, or something, which probably should have been accompanied by “Love Shack” playing softly in the background – missed opportunity, Emily Owens, M.D. – and Emily is all, “Haha, yes, but no, because science.”
As she’s in a hospital and this is what she does, the woman also decides to check out how the cards believe her own health is going. Bad idea: guess what, she’s going to die within 24 hours! This obviously makes her a bit upset, but Emily quells her fears by repeating, “No. No. SCIENCE!” Back to the storyline about Jealous Will (groan), Emily has decided to conduct an “experiment”: flirt while Will’s around, and see if he gets jealous again. This seems like an awful idea, because 1) Ugh, flirting is fun when you really like someone, but purposeful flirting with someone you don’t sounds legitimately like the worst thing in the world, and 2) Will is stupid! However, the only good thing about this is that Tyra has stepped up to the plate because she knows Emily is a bad flirter. She demonstrates for Emily with Hot Molly how it should be done. Can everyone else hear the Hallelujah Chorus in the background, or is it just me? Perfect perfect perfect ahhhhhhhhh! I feel that now that that screen cap has been made, my job here is done. The lesbian TV gods have listened. Let us rejoice and be glad!
However, there are still other important things that need to be addressed, things such as Bandari’s perfect face, which we soon see standing next to her husband in an elevator. They wrap up what seems to be a tense conversation as Emily steps in, and after a moment of silence, Bandari introduces them. In top Emily form, she gushes, “Wait, you’re MARRIED?! I mean, I, err, you seem like a lovely couple!” Smooth. Tyra continues to support Emily’s pursuit of Will (I know you’re a good friend, but Tyra, why?), and encourages her to make the moves when an opportunity to have Will over at her place to help put together a bookcase falls in Emily’s lap. Well, how it actually happens is, Emily’s like, “I’m going to put together a bookcase tonight!” And Will says, “Do you need help? Me man, me build things while woman watch!” And Emily says, “Yeah!”
After getting this glorious photo text from Tyra during the putting together of the bookcase, Emily feels encouraged and runs out to get some more beer. When she returns, Will has fallen asleep. Which is swell, because everyone knows that when you have a crush on someone, the absolute best way to get over it is to watch them sleep. Unlike Tyra and Hot Molly, though, things aren’t as chummy with Bandari and her husband. We cut to their bedroom once again, where they are continuing the unhappy conversation from the elevator, and where, more importantly, Bandari is buttoning up her shirt. Their dialogue after this is rather typical: He wants a separation. She says, you don’t get to decide that. He says, I don’t have a choice. She says, I’ll change. He says, you’ve been saying that for years. She says, you know what you signed up for when you married me. Also, if I wasn’t a woman, I wouldn’t have to apologize for my career! etc., etc. Except it’s still sad because Bandari’s eyes look so vulnerable and pleading and half of you agrees with her: she DOES have to stay late at work all the time, because people ARE dying, and she IS the best, so she HAS to be there! This episode also introduced us to a new bro in the Denver hospital scene, a handsome and charming guy who was apparently an intern with Micah back in the day, who’s been MIA for a year. Word on the street is that he made a medical mistake, had a huge blowup with Bandari about it, got suspended, and then never came back. But now he’s here, and is meeting with the chief to try to get his job back. Bandari’s status: unimpressed. It seems strange to introduce a new character at this point in the game, but in the defense of the writers, they did write these episodes before they knew the show was getting the axe. Micah defends his friend to Bandari as they scrub down after a surgery, and she appears to possibly listen, the way she does when someone actually speaks honestly with her.
Since finding out that Bandari’s husband actually exists via Emily’s first-hand knowledge, people have also been gossiping about her and saying mean things and I just want them to leave her alone! She says that she doesn’t take anything personally; Micah makes the point that continuing to hold out against the bro seems to prove the opposite. Although I would argue that it depends on how bad the dude screwed up.
But during this conversation, she also asks Micah to cover some of her shifts in the upcoming month so she and her husband can take a trip. So maybe this means that the separation is temporarily delayed, and things might be looking up.
The new bro then shows up as Bandari is walking to her car after her shift, to make one last plea. Already softened from Micah, she asks him some medical questions and, as everyone in medical shows always magically can, he answers everything flawlessly. She says, fine, sure, you’re in. As she starts to get into her car, he then says, “And what about that other thing that happened right before I left?” She looks back, replies, “I’m married. It was a mistake.” And gets into her car, gives a half-regretful, half-pining stare into the distance. I don’t like this one bit. It adds some more drama, of course, and explains the introduction of bro into the storyline. But I don’t like to think of Bandari as an adulterer, in addition to this just continuing to affirm the tired storyline of everyone in hospitals sleeping/cheating with each other. I like to think of her struggles with her husband as genuine, that she’s simply a complex woman who’s good at her job but who still needs to be loved in her own way. This just doesn’t seem to fit into her character, at least the character that I’ve become close with in my brain. But this could just be me.
But hey, back to those patients I mentioned ages ago! Not surprisingly, Diabetic Psychic does develop a more serious heart condition within 24 hours and needs to be rushed into open heart surgery. She almost dies but then doesn’t so everybody’s sort of right and science and psychic-cards can all hold hands and hug! We’ve also learned that she has sort of a crappy hotshot lawyer son, but don’t worry, Emily obviously brings him and his mom closer together at the end.
In Cystic Fibrosis Boy news, while he’s gotten his new pair of lungs, they also discovered in surgery that he has cancer. Yeah. Talk about a bummer. So before he can have any time at all to celebrate, you know, being able to breathe, he has to decide whether to undergo chemo. His parents, who have been very, “Our son’s a fighter! He was supposed to die when he was six months old!” rah rah the whole time, believe, of course, that he can fight this, too. But he tells Emily, maybe I’m tired of fighting. Maybe I just want to learn how to surf.
After hearing this, Cassandra decides she has to sit down and talk to the well-meaning parents, to explain that medical procedures helped save her brother for a little while, but in the end, she bets he probably just would have wanted to see some national parks instead of more hospitals before he died. The parents take this to heart, and revive their plans to travel to Hawaii instead of fighting cancer. Cassandra is being a Good Person here, and real character development looks good on her. We end the episode with believing that Emily might finally, finally be seeing the light in Micah’s eyes as they glance at each other across the hall, before Will sends her a message to meet him on the roof. This guy, he ruins everything. In the wintery air, he asks her to not mention that he crashed on her couch the other night, because during the Peanuts Guy date, Cassandra got the crazy notion that he might be jealous, and he doesn’t want to fan the flames. Emily’s brain starts exploding: Cassandra thinks he’s jealous! Cassandra knows everything about men! HE LIKES ME! So while Emily’s story is still stuck in this rut, we actually saw quite a bit of development for all of our other female characters this episode, making it one of my favorite yet. What did you all think?
