Critic’s Rating: 3 / 5.0
3
What the heck, Chicago Med?
Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8’s fall finale felt mostly like a regular episode, nothing really special.
The cliffhanger felt more tacked on than exciting, thought it was more suited to the last episode we’ll get for nearly two months than the rest of the show had been.
Dr. Archer’s Potential Resignation Should Have Been A Bigger Question At The End of Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8
Archer spent most of the hour pretending he was thrilled to no longer be ED chief.
He said he was grateful for the extra free time, told Lenox he had no hard feelings, and offered to take a patient off her hands.
His behavior on Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8 would have made sense if he had a secret plan to steal the position back from Lenox.
That would have been a classic Archer move, and it was the reason I was so suspicious of how relaxed he seemed to be since the decision came down.
However, after the Thanksgiving party, Archer told Hannah he was going to resign because he couldn’t be happy in a lesser position and didn’t have much reason to stay.
Not only was that NOT who Archer is, but it was a plot point designed to get him to Sharon’s office at the right time to learn she was being held hostage and had been stabbed. Ugh!
Archer’s feelings about his demotion are valid, but the way his resignation was handled was not.
I dislike when characters do things just because they need to be in a certain place at a certain time. It feels manipulative.
Archer’s struggle with the question of whether to stay or go should have been more prominent. Rather than coming out of nowhere, it should have been a bona fide story.
Plus, Hannah won the wishbone pull, which meant Archer had to wait 24 hours before submitting his resignation letter. So why was he delivering it now, other than the plot demanded it?
Archer has never been my favorite character, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about him leaving.
I don’t think it’s happening, anyway. He’ll have to help save Sharon when Med returns in January, and that’ll probably lead him to decide he needs to stay where he is.
Which is all well and good, but was it too much to ask for a story that wasn’t full of predictable tropes?
Sharon’s Stalker Reveal Was Incredibly Disappointing
Anyone who knows me knows how much I love a good mystery. I write them, read them, and watch them on TV.
But this stalker storyline has been problematic from the get-go, and the reveal on Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8 wasn’t much better.
Why did Atwater and the rest of the Chicago PD crew think they’d caught the stalker and that he was a white guy named Paul Dunn who’d been laid off when it was actually a Black woman whose beef with Sharon had nothing to do with employment?
That’s the kind of shoddy police work that belongs on Days of Our Lives, not the One Chicago shows.
I’m not sure if the stalker had been featured on Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 1 or if she was newly created for this story.
I guess her motivation was plausible, though I don’t recall a single clue suggesting the stalker was the gruntled ex-wife of a dead patient.
It felt like the writers made up their minds about this solution at the last minute and came up with something semi-plausible, but it could have been so much better.
Many fans assumed Reese would be the stalker, which turned out to be a red herring, but there was another idea that would have been far more interesting.
Why Zach Hudgins Would Have Been The Perfect Stalker On Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8
Zach was a quiet and earnest resident who was abruptly fired at the end of the 10th season premiere.
He’d frozen up during a mass casualty event and left Sharon to tend to a patient by herself. Lenox fired him for his failure, and Sharon signed off on it.
Thus, Zach had every reason to cause Sharon trouble. She was involved in every aspect of his firing.
Unlike Cassidy, the real stalker, Zach would have been well-known to the audience and his behavior might have made sense in retrospect.
Instead, we got a random stalker and a conversation full of tropes in which Sharon tried to talk the woman down, but the perp lost her temper and stabbed her, then felt guilty about it for half an episode.
The ending sequence on Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8 was somewhat confusing. If Sharon was supposedly unconscious from loss of blood, why did Cassidy have to cover her mouth to stop her from calling for help?
Sharon was faking but had the strength to run to the lobby door and bang on it to get Archer’s attention despite having just been stabbed.
If this makes sense to you, please explain it in the comments. To me, it seemed like a case of randomly disappearing injuries.
It Was Nice To See Reese Again, But Her Visit Resolved Nothing
Reese and Charles crossed paths again after six years when Reese’s patient landed in the ED.
Her interactions with Charles throughout Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8 were strange. I could have understood if they were awkward, considering the reason Reese left in the first place, but that wasn’t the problem.
It was almost as if they were determined not to discuss the elephant in the room.
Reese originally left because she believed Dr. Charles had allowed her father to die while treating him for a heart attack. She’d spent most of Chicago Med Season 4 determined to give this abusive psychopath another chance, only for him to collapse after Charles confronted him with evidence he was a serial killer.
Instead of being grateful to have dodged a literal bullet, Reese focused on the fact that Charles hesitated before starting chest compressions. In her mind, he let her father die, and she couldn’t deal with her belief that Charles had betrayed her.
(Reese was also on the flighty side and jumped from pathology to nothing to psychiatry, which was also left out of Charles’ shockingly high praise of her.)
If Reese was going to come back, she and Charles should have cleared the air about that old conflict. Instead, they acted like they were old friends until Charles disagreed with Reese’s questionable methods.
There are times when unorthodox methods work — ask Brilliant Minds‘ Oliver Wolf about that.
However, I couldn’t blame Charles for being suspicious of Reese secretly giving a suicidal patient placebos so that she would learn that she didn’t need medication to keep her depression at bay.
Anti-depressants are controversial because some people think they are just a crutch. They’re also necessary for some people or during some circumstances.
I wouldn’t be comfortable with a psychiatrist who engages in all-or-nothing thinking about psychiatric drugs, and doubly so if she’s going to lie about what she’s giving her patient.
Also, didn’t the patient have to fill this prescription at a pharmacy? How exactly did this trick work?
In any case, when Charles wouldn’t enable this ridiculous plan just because the patient was actively suicidal again, Reese accused him of thinking he was always right.
She was coming off as emotional and incompetent, which is not who Reese should be.
Charles was right that nobody swallows 12 pills by accident. Sheesh.
Some Quick Thoughts About The Rest Of Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8
- Yes, there was a patient of the week, a goofy guy who wanted to marry his girlfriend but was at risk of dying from injuries sustained in a car accident. This case wasn’t particularly memorable, though I loved Archer’s cavalier attitude toward getting ordained online.
- So Lenox has a brother who has an alcohol problem and two dead parents. Did they die in an alcohol-related car crash?
- I could have done without any more Sully drama. That story is over, so could it please go away?
Over to you, Chicago Med fanatics. What did you think of Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 8?
Am I being too hard on this fall finale, or did you also find it lacking?
Vote in our poll to rank the episode, and then hit the comments to let us know.
Chicago Med airs on NBC on Thursdays at 8/7c and on Peacock on Fridays. The next new episode airs on January 8, 2025.
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