The past most certainly isn’t done with Amy just yet.
Doc’s highly anticipated return brings us back to Amy’s Westside world on Doc Season 3 Episode 1, and with it, we have some hints at what the season can have in store for us.
A flashback-heavy hour brings new insight and clarity, plus new faces and predicaments, but Amy remains at the center, with a newfound purpose and intention.
For the most part, the season premiere eases us into the season. It suffers from whatever the multi-seasonal equivalent of “pilotitis” is (“premiereitis?”). It hits us with a lot of information and retells the story while setting up what’s to come.
It’s the cliffhanger that makes you perk up.
Ben presents as a new antagonist for the series, especially when he immediately reads as a power player with an agenda; he seems to have earned everyone’s praise with his skill set and professional reputation, but he also has an agenda that can completely disrupt everything.
If the Doc Season 2 finale gives us the version of Ben that’s charming, suave, and a bit of a cowboy who has immense respect for Amy and loves the rush of surgery, then the premiere gives us this version of him who feels a bit more arrogant and calculating.
Admittedly, I don’t know what to do with that just yet, nor do I know where I’d like to see the season head with him in that regard. It gives me shades of Morris Chestnut’s run as Barrett Cain on The Resident.
Right now, Ben feels like a wild card who is hard to place, and much of that comes from his connection to Amy, which we still can’t make heads or tails of.
We know they were involved with each other sometime after she and Michael divorced, and maybe, presumably, hopefully, before she started her relationship with Jake. However, I briefly wondered about that because of the cliffhanger flashback to a phone call between them.
I mean, we spent most of the hour with the flashbacks taking place on the day of Amy’s accident, right?
The premiere does a lot of flashbacks and memories alongside dialogue to catch us up or fill us in on what’s happened since we last spent time at Westside.
However, some of it felt like treading water again, too.
Flashbacks are often one of Doc‘s strongest tools in telling Amy’s story and continuing to shape her. But sometimes they’re employed when we don’t need them, or they’re combined with the memory angle as well, which leads to more confusion than anything else.
The premiere gives us a lot. We get hit with a host of memories Amy has coming back to her, though they carry a more emotional and less urgent tone since they tend to be rooted in how she has connected with those around her.
The flashbacks of the hour mostly center on the day of her accident, and I wondered whether that date had specific significance or was simply a way to remind us how serious things had become with Jake.
At the same time, everything else around her and all her other dynamics were so fraught.
We learn that the day of her accident, she was livid at Sonya for not backing her and essentially throwing her under the bus when a patient’s family lodged a complaint.
Her abrasive, derisive behavior toward Sonya, for what was likely the umpteenth time, led Sonya to finally say she’d turn in her resignation.
The two women were like oil and water, and it was difficult to watch at times. You can see there was no love lost on either side, but it does mean they were in an interesting place post-accident: Sonya was still in that place of wanting to quit, and now Amy is back and a different person.
The flashbacks retread water, reminding us how difficult and harsh Amy could be to anyone who wasn’t Jake, and they also try to remind us to sympathize with Sonya’s position as someone seemingly always on the receiving end of Amy’s behavior.
To be fair, Amy using almost any chance she could to make digs at Sonya to colleagues was unbelievably unprofessional.
But those flashbacks and the memories Amy shared also showed how serious things were between her and Jake, which I’m sure makes where they are now hurt more.
On the day of the accident, she was finally ready to go public with their relationship, with both of them saying they’d tell their daughters about one another, and so forth. She was actively telling him she loved him.
Jake seemed to be the one good thing that lit up her world and put a smile on her face. Now they’re in this weird impasse: they’re broken up and trying to remain professional around each other, but it’s just so awkward.
In many ways, Amy taking a beat to focus on herself and what she needs and wants out of life before complicating and confusing her dynamics with other people is perfectly reasonable.
I’m Team Amy enough to rock with that for a bit as she gathers her bearings. But boy, it is so messy.
It leaves many characters typically caught up in romantic entanglements trying to focus their energy on their careers.
Michael takes up this new gig and tries to build up the department. Jake pursuing Cardio instead of Peds (in hindsight, while he’s perfect for Peds, it makes sense that he doesn’t want to bring that home to Mia).
That awkwardness with all of them, especially as Amy keeps experiencing these emotionally driven flashes of memories, is a bit rough.
As Gina said, Amy may be trying to move on from the past — move forward — but it’s like the past has a grip on her, and it’s not done with her yet.
But maybe part of the issue is that Amy doesn’t exactly make peace with the past or properly face it, process it, and then move on. She lets it hold her in a way she can’t quite shake, and it affects all her relationships and how she moves.
It’s not lost that with fresh memories of her romance with Jake the first time cropping up, there’s this bit of wistfulness and regret that seems to be brewing there, and she feels that focusing on her calling, as Joan said, is the perfect distraction for any jumbled-up feeling she may have about anything else.
And speaking of Joan’s presence, she haunts the narrative a bit here as Amy makes Joan’s last request of her the very reason she’s existing right now. Joan wasn’t wrong in her messaging, and it’s great that this new sense of purpose is fueling Amy.
But she’s making it her everything, and she doesn’t do things by half-measure, so making this her all-consuming may come at a cost, too!
So far, it’s made her the one with the lighter touch with the interns between her and Sonya, but she’s also haunted by the fact that Sonya could very well be becoming a version of her — the least appealing version.
The co-chief resident angle raises a bunch of new conflict and tension, and it also lets Sonya and Amy understand each other’s perspective a bit more.
Amy’s memories of how terrible and harsh she was with Sonya keep shaping how she approaches these new interns. The guilt seems to be eating away at her, not just because she doesn’t want to repeat her mistakes, but also because she’s afraid she ruined Sonya a bit.
She gave an inspiring, uplifting speech to the interns, with a soft touch that even surprised some of them, given her previous reputation. And then she went quite easily on Chen when she made an error.
It was different than what De Silva felt she got from Sonya, who is a bit more stern and wants her approach to be “tough love without the snark.” Ironically, Sonya had a hard edge, but it didn’t seem like she was venturing into belittling territory.
Still, that hasn’t stopped Amy from noticing and fearing that Sonya might end up mentoring the same way Amy did. It’s a way Doc keeps mining the interesting cycle of mentorship and dynamics with the Joan, Amy, Sonya thing.
But for where we are, Amy risks overcompensating, and Sonya could potentially become exactly what she disliked in the first place. We’ll just have to see how that plays out.
Amy will likely keep her concerns to herself since her memories leave her feeling that she could end Sonya’s career if she has too much sway, which is fascinating when we saw via the flashbacks that Sonya’s frustrations often lay in the fact that no matter what Amy did, she wouldn’t face consequences.
Amid all this, the hour had everyone essentially working on a medical case from different angles when Tori and her teacher both fell ill and ended up at the hospital.
But ultimately, it was a case that went in some interesting directions as they dove into the type of trauma that the body holds even if the mind actively tries to become desensitized.
The mass hysteria portion was one of those quirky little asides, but at the core, we had a bunch of high school kids who have spent their entire lives going through school shooter drills roughly six times a year, and none of them really got to unpack how traumatizing that experience in itself is.
I can only come at it from the perspective of juggling terror attack drills along with run-of-the-mill fire drills growing up in the 9/11 era.
School shootings were a jarring development coming up in the Columbine era — but now? They happen so often that society expects us to become desensitized.
And, sadly, largely, we are. But then you consider these kids, who have to run these drills six times a year, some of which include mock trials where one of them pretends to be the shooter, and the bulk of the experience is hiding behind desks and fighting back.
It’s all insane. The hour hits home how insane it is for that to be the norm, and that while we want to treat it as normal, our bodies have trauma responses to these things anyway.
It’s a decent enough prospect to explore, even though it feels like the issue is too on-the-nose and hamfisted while simultaneously being too buried beneath everything else we were exploring in the premiere.
It’s hard to strike a balance between compelling and preachy, especially when there are so many other factors at play during the hour.
It can’t fully give the case itself and what it could have done the due it may have needed, or give it the same emotional pull and impact as, say, Doc Season 2 Episode 10‘s case.
The biggest thing to watch is this Ben/Amy situation. He’s hot, mysterious, capable, and has the charm to lure people in. But he still hasn’t told Amy about their relationship, which raises flags.
And the way he’s negotiating, essentially taking over and pushing someone like Kosta out just because he has a different style, is alarming.
But so is that damn flashback. Because clearly the trial he has — the one that’s on the cusp of being taken to the human stage — isn’t great, and somehow Amy is involved, and I need the details and what we should be bracing for next!
Over to you, Doc Fanatics.
What’s your impression of Ben? Are you interested in the possible role reversal between Amy and Sonya? Let’s discuss the premiere below!
We’ll have a full post-mortem interview with showrunner Hank Steinberg tomorrow, so don’t forget to come back!
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