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“Complications” recap (1.1 & 1.2): Hide and Seek

When I was a kid, my favorite way to start out a story was with the line: “It was a dark and stormy night.” There’s just something timeless about an ominous evening that really sets the scene, and I stand by that to this day. So I was quite pleased when the pilot of Complications opened up with a wide shot on a house. At night. In the pouring rain.

A car pulls up to the house. Inside, there’s a couple in bed, but the dude is woken up by their barking dog. He gets up to check it out, and hears someone else in the house. He comes back and tells the woman to lock herself in the room no matter what. Uh, maybe call 911, you dummies? The man heads downstairs, and he pulls a gun(?!) out of his medical bag. What happened to “do no harm,” bro!

10 Hours Earlier

That same gun-toting doctor is now standing in a psychiatrist’s office. “I don’t believe in violence,” he says, but I’m not inclined to believe him knowing that he will pull a gun on someone less than half a day later. He muses a bit about how people don’t actually die in the hospital-they really die out there on the street. The psychiatrist gets the session started and asks him why he thinks he’s here. He spouts off some psychological conditions that he remembers “from his psych rotation” and my first impression is that he’s a bit of a dick.

She tells him that she just wants to understand what happened, and we see flashbacks of him: running down the hospital hall, knocking shit down, breaking a window, beating the crap out of some dudes in a waiting room. During these flashbacks, he’s tells the psychiatrist that it’s up to her to decide what happened, why he did what he did.

The psychiatrist decides to back up a little bit and asks the doctor, John, about his family. He has a wife, Sam, a son, Oliver, and a daughter, Becky, who died last year. He’s been working in emergency medicine for ten years. He asks the psychiatrist if they can skip all this, but she’s like, “Sir, you went completely crazy on a room full of people, so… no.” She asks him to tell her what happened last Sunday.

Sunday

John is at work in the hospital, where he helps a colleague move some patients around to make room. (Bed tetris!) He finds a nurse, Gretchen, smoking in an empty room. She is sassy and I immediately love her.

They are treating a guy with diabetes, Henry, who hasn’t been taking his insulin. He is in bad shape and very close to needing amputation, but, after Henry begs them not to take his foot, John gives him one more chance. John’s co-worker, Dr. Bridget, thinks they should just cut off the foot, because it’s basically been gone for weeks now. John still wants to give it one more shot.

John gets home and plays with his son and dog, Zeke. Zeke has barked one time and I already am very emotionally invested in his wellbeing. John is tired and stressed, so his wife gives him a massage. She’s like, “Hey baby, you know what would really relax you? A hand job.” Thankfully, Zeke is a goddamn American hero-he starts barking and saves us from heterosexual content. Zeke, however, did attack a squirrel, which John finds and stitches up. John’s wife starts crying because she thinks of how their daughter, Becky, liked chasing squirrels in the yard.

The squirrel (I had named him Simon) dies on the way to the animal hospital (RIP Simon), and John has a bit of a freakout in the car. While he’s sitting there he hears gunshots. Someone is calling out for help, so John runs over. There’s a man in the street, he’s hovering over a boy who was been shot. John tells the dude to call 911… but the other guy runs away, and drops his gun, when he sees the car coming back. John decides to pick up the gun and fire at the car. He must hit the driver, because the car swerves off the road.

There’s a detective talking to John, telling him he’s very lucky: the driver of the car is dead, and the passenger ran away. The detective tells him the driver got hit with multiple gunshot wounds to the torso, which was likely the cause of death. John wants to know if they brought the boy to Samaritan Hospital, because he works there. They did, in fact, take the boy there. The detective is very impressed that John was able to hit a moving target at that range.

Present

The psychiatrist asks John what he was feeling when he pulled the trigger. John tells her that he didn’t really think, he just wanted to save the kid. She asks how he feels about the guy he shot. John feels angry that the guy put him in the position to do that. The psychiatrist pushes him a little and John bites back, wondering what perfect combination of guilt and dissociation would be the right answer for her. John’s being a dick again, basically.

Sunday

Back at the police station, the detective shows John a few headshots of gang members (from feuding gangs) and asks if he recognizes any of them. John does not. The detective also asks John if he’s planning on talking to the media and playing the big damn hero. John tells the detective that’s not who he is, and goes out to hug his wife.

Back at home, Sam gets off the phone with her friend in the DA’s office. She didn’t get a lot of extra information, but she has a couple of names: The boy in the hospital is Antoine Tyler and the boy John shot was Raul Mendoza, a known gang associate. Sam asks how John is doing. John says he feels better, like he can breathe. He actually wants to go to work.

The next day, John stops at a gun range after dropping his son off at school. For his rental, he chooses the same gun he used to shoot the driver yesterday. As it turns out, John is a pretty terrible shot. Sam calls and asks John where he is. John lies, and then Sam tells him that his father is coming over. John looks like he needs a nap.

John’s dad came over because he was worried. John’s dad casually references ‘Nam, so John asks him if he was good at war. John’s dad says yeah, because he did what he was told. He tells a story about his first firefight, assuring his son that things will get better with time, and then pulls out a gun. John doesn’t want to take it at first, but, finally, he does.

That night, John has a nightmare about the shooting. First, he’s the passenger in the car, and then he’s himself. He wakes up and Sam is worried because he was thrashing. He assures her that it was just a dream, but then lies and tells her that he doesn’t remember what it was about.The next day, John gets to work and is suspicious of some dudes loitering outside the hospital.

He walks in and is surprised by his colleagues with a sweet SuperDoctor cake and lots of cheers and praise.

John checks on the boy, asking his surgeon all about his injuries. The doctor is like, “Listen, if you want me to tell you that your actions saved his life-you did, bruh.” While John is looking at the boy, deep in thought, Gretchen comes by to tell him about a new patient. She just has a broken collarbone, but it’s super obvious that her boyfriend is abusing her.

John tells them that he needs to do a pelvic exam to get the boyfriend out of the room. Once he’s gone, John tries to talk to her calmly. Gretchen has had enough of this bullshit, though, and she starts yelling at the girl, telling the patient that her boyfriend is going to kill her eventually.

John takes her out of the room and tries to talk her down, but Gretchen is just like, “Do you still have that gun? Let’s just shoot that bastard. Totally JK. Unless you have it. And you want to. Then I’m down.” John judges her silently before sending her away. A couple of other doctors see the altercation and wonder if Gretchen is being a problem again. Hot Doctor Bridget is snarky.

So, I realize that Bridget and Gretchen have not even directly interacted yet, but I just want to put something on the record here: I ship it. Gretchen is described as a “reckless, but capable nurse” and Bridget is “John’s by-the-book coworker.” Come on! I need that.

Anyway. The other doctor asks John to look at some scans and consult. John’s interest is peaked by the day-old injury. When he sees the patient, Rodriguez, he immediately thinks it’s the passenger from the car. John goes in to ask him some questions – he wants to know how he got hurt, but the guy won’t talk. Finally, they get into a physical altercation, and the patient pulls a knife. He stabs John in the arm and they wrassle until the patient is sedated. John finds a gun in Rodriguez’ pocket and asks him if he came to kill the Antoine Tyler. He puts the gun in the patient’s face, and his doctor friend is like, “Yeah, maybe don’t do that buddy.”

Present

The psychiatrist asks John if his medical judgement was impaired at this point. John says nope, that he was just protecting his patient in all these cases. Again, John is kind of a jerk to the psychiatrist, he challenges her logic in an annoying way. If I were her, I would probably hate him at this point. The psychiatrist wants to know more about Antoine.

Back to Wednesday (tbh, I thought we were still on Monday or Tuesday, but this is what the psychiatrist wrote down in her little notebook, so let’s go with that)

As the other doctor, Dan, stitches up John’s arm, John calls the detective to report what just happened. The detective doesn’t think there’s enough evidence there to take any immediate action. John hangs up and Dan is like, “We need to talk buddy, because you have no chill. You should go home.” John’s like, “Nah, I’m good.” Meanwhile, a bunch of dudes looking for Rodriguez are in the waiting room and trying to get in. They’re all over the hospital, but the police are really busy and can’t make it over right away. John decides to declare an internal emergency.

Bridget tells John that his diabetes patient, Henry, came back in with a torn open foot, and he isn’t taking news of his amputation well. Bridget asks if John will go talk to him. John finds Henry unresponsive-he OD’d after finding out about the amputation. John and Bridget try to resuscitate him, but he is dead. Bridget comes to talk to John, explaining what happened, but John just tells her that it’s not her fault, he was John’s patient. He called the code, he’ll do paperwork. As John is struggling to not man-cry into his little microphone thing, a nurse tells him he has a phone call.

On the phone is Antoine’s dad from prison and he’s calling from a cellphone that belongs to a guard. He tells John that the gang is going to keep trying to kill his son. He wants John to save him, and if Antoine dies tonight they’re going to have a problem.

John is wondering if he knows anyone with questionable morals that will help him, when he sees Gretchen walk by. Perfect! John asks her if the collarbone patient from earlier is still around and asks Gretchen if she’d like to help her. He tells Gretchen they can fake some meningitis to get her into isolation and see a social worker. Gretchen’s eyes do a thing that makes me think she is probably internally yelling, “Fuck yeah! Let’s do crime to make people safe!”

John tells her that he needs help getting Antoine out of the hospital. They can pretend he’s the diabetes patient and transfer him to another surgical center. When Antoine gets there, and obviously isn’t Henry, he’ll just be a John Doe with a GSW. Gretchen is like, “That is the dumbest f-ing idea i’ve ever heard, but I’m’a help you anyway.”

John casually falsifies some lab reports and calls in the meningitis thing, then texts Gretchen, because it’s always a good idea to leave a digital trail of your crimes. We’re finally caught up to those flashbacks from before! John runs down the hall and causes a ruckus. He screams and pushes people, trying to get to the gang members to create a diversion. As he’s beating the crap out of them, Gretchen sneaks into the boy’s room and gives him a new bracelet before wheeling him out to an ambulance.

Present

The psychiatrist tries to process this new information, just now realizing that Antoine Tyler did not, in fact, just disappear into thin air. She tells john that she has to report this. John tells her if she does, the kid will die anyway. She’s like, “This is criminal behavior and, frankly, I’ve known you for like an hour and I can already tell you have a God complex. You cannot go back to being a doctor.”

John tells the psychiatrist that she also took an oath to do no harm and if she reports this, he will lose his job and Antoine Tyler will be found and killed. He asks her if that’s an acceptable outcome, and she says no. As he’s leaving, she tells him that there’s a reason you only play God while you are actively treating a patient. She says that if you take that outside the hospital, there will be complications. (And there’s the show name! Bingo!) John leaves without saying goodbye or thank you. Rude.

Later, John reads the report from the psychiatrist. She recommended a leave of absence, but he can keep his job. His wife comes in to ask how he’s doing and he’s like, “Tra la la what a day! I’m still a doc!” She’s like, “Ok, that’s cool, but what about how you beat up a room full of gang members?” John says: ” ?»\_(Òâä)_/?» I’m fine!” After this scene, I made my wife promise not to lie to me if she becomes a vigilante, because I want in on that shit.

John and Sam kiss passionately. We cut to them in bed later, and now we’re right back to where we started the episode. There’s an intruder in the house and John pulls his gun out. Turns out it’s the man from the park – he and his buddies want to know how Antoine is doing. John tells them he’s fine, that he’s in another surgical facility. Park guy is pleased by this information and tells John that he doesn’t have to worry about the guys he beat up in the waiting room anymore. Then he shows John a picture on a phone:

He leaves the phone and tells John that there’s a number on there in case he needs anything. John doesn’t think he will, but Park Guy leaves it anyway.

One Year Ago

John drives his family-including Becky, who has cancer-to the hospital. When they get there, Becky doesn’t want to go in because the medicine hurts. John tells her that sometimes medicine has to hurt so it will work, and she finally lets him carry her out of the car.

Present

The police are at John’s house post-intruder alert. Maybe Sam did call 911 after all! John tells his son, Oliver, not to be scared, before calling Gretchen. He asks Gretchen how Antoine is doing, Gretchen says that he’s fine. She overhears Sam mention the police in the background, so she asks John wtf is going on. John explains what happened, and says he is going to talk to the police. Gretchen reminds John that snitches get stitches, so John lies to the cops.

The next day, Gretchen arrives at the hospital and finds the abusive boyfriend from yesterday yelling at another doctor. He wants to talk to John, but the other doctor says no. When the boyfriend sees Gretchen, he yells that he wants to talk to her and gets physical with the doctor. He gets kicked out, and Gretchen flips him off on her way past.

In the locker room, Bridget finds Gretchen to ask her if there is anything she should know about John’s cases from the night of the incident. Gretchen decides to distract Bridget (and me) by peeling off her shirt. Bridget is clearly flustered and averts her eyes as she stumbles on her words.

Back at John’s house, Sam is worried. John tries to play it off like everything is cool, but Sam reminds him that he did shoot and kill a gang member. She also doesn’t seem to believe the fact that John didn’t see anything when the intruder was in the house. John hugs her and promises that he’ll protect the family, and Oliver interrupts them before they can talk about it more.

At the hospital, Gretchen goes out to the loading dock under the guise of taking a smoke break to meet John and give him some fake medical papers. She tells John that Bridget has been digging into his cases, especially the “fake meningitis” one. John says he’ll talk to her, but Gretchen tells him that she’ll take care of it. Yeah she will.

Gretchen goes up to visit the woman with fake-meningitis, and she tells the woman to lie about her symptoms. The woman, Hillary, doesn’t want to lie, but Gretchen points out that she’s been lying about her injuries for years. Gretchen tells Hillary that it’s fine if she doesn’t like her because the feeling is mutual, but Gretchen knows what she’s going through. Hillary snaps at her to leave.

John heads over to the other surgical center to plant the chart, scribbling nonsense for his sign in name. He leaves the chart and goes to check on Antoine, but he is not in his bed. John’s vision blurs as he thinks about his daughter. Her chemo had been unresponsive, even though it was supposed to be 85% effective.

At work, Sam sees police officers and is distracted. She tells her co-worker she’ll meet her later and calls some dude named Kyle, asking if he wants to get coffee. Sketchy.

Gretchen, meanwhile, continues to steal my heart and live up to her “reckless, but capable” description. She’s bribing some dude in the hospital office with pain killers so he’ll change the name of the attending physician on Hillary’s file. (As it turns out, he was also the one who made the fake record for Antoine, too.) She’s too late, though, because Bridget already pulled the file. As she’s leaving, Hillary’s boyfriend sees her and demands to see his girlfriend. She says no, and he grabs her to make her take him. Luckily, an orderly walks out, so Gretchen calls out to him and gets away from the boyfriend.

As she’s walking down the hall, John calls her and explains that Antoine is missing. Gretchen tries to rationalize it, asking John if maybe he’s getting a procedure done? John’s like, “Nah, my spidey sense is tingling. Something is wrong.” Gretchen tells him to ring up his old gang buddies before being called away to help Bridget with a patient.

John makes the call, asking if anyone picked up Antoine. The guy on the phone reminds John that he was supposed to look out for him, and tells him not to leave. John goes back into the hospital, telling the nurse he spoke to earlier that the kid he came to check on is missing. He tells him that he thinks the boy may have been abducted, so they head to the security office together.

Kyle, it turns out, is Sam’s friend in the DA’s office. I guess that’s a little less sketchy. She tells him all about what’s been happening with John and asks if there’s anything he can do. Witness protection, perhaps? He says he’ll do what he can, but it doesn’t seem like that’s much. During this dark and scary moment in Sam’s life, Kyle decides to pull the old “arm touch” move and let her know that he really missed her. Ugh, Kyle, I hate you now. Sam says it was unfair of her to come to him, so I’m guessing maybe they had an affair.

Back at the hospital, Gretchen and another doctor are treating a super high patient, when someone comes to tell Gretchen that the isolation patient is asking for her. Gretchen goes up to talk to her, and Hillary attempts to blackmail her and John. She wants $10k to lie about her symptoms. Gretchen basically tells her to go fuck herself.

John and the nurse are trying to track down Antoine when the guy from the park shows up again. He and John go for a stroll out to the parking lot just as Gretchen texts him an SOS. John gets into an SUV and meets Darius, who is running things for Antoine’s dad while he’s in jail. John wants to go to the police, but the gang dudes don’t want him to. They think maybe the nurse John was talking to knows something because he looks Mexican.

John goes back inside to talk to the nurse, and they realize that there was a break in the kid’s IV. He wasn’t as sedated as everyone thought. John thinks that if he really did wake up and get out of bed, he’d be scared and want to hide.

At Samaritan, Bridget tells Gretchen that her meningitis patient doesn’t actually have meningitis. Duh, keep up, Bridge! She wants Gretchen to go up to isolation with her so they can confirm Hillary’s story. Bridget is quick to assume that John fucked up, but when she asks Hillary about her symptoms, Hillary lies just like Gretchen told her to.

After Bridget leaves, Hillary breaks down. She tells Gretchen that she was right, her boyfriend is abusing her, and, damn- she could’ve used that $10k. She doesn’t know how to get away from him. Gretchen asks her where she lives, because she has a heart of gold and is going to go pick up Hillary’s stuff.

At the surgical center, John and the nurse are running around looking for Antoine. Finally, they find him bloody and unconscious down by the loading dock. They bring him back to bed and get him patched up, and the guy from the park tells Antoine he has to stay here and get better. He also tells Antoine that John is going to look after him, and then acts vaguely threatening toward the nurse.

John and Gretchen are finally reunited at Samaritan, each of them mostly successful in their tasks. John is upset though, and he tells Gretchen that there was another gang shooting just because he couldn’t find Antoine for a few hours. He’s got the guilt, y’all.

The next day, John and his family sit down to breakfast, newly protected by a police officer stationed outside. Sam tells him that her friend Kyle, who she met at a counseling group, pulled some strings. I’m like 90% sure Sam and Kyle boned at this point. Even though they don’t normally do this, Sam leads her family in a prayer before eating. John’s phone starts buzzing as soon as he’s about to eat. It’s Gretchen. She’s at Hillary’s boyfriend’s house, but something happened. She and the guy from the hospital office are covered in blood, and she asks John how soon he can get there.

What did you guys think of the premiere of Complications?

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