Chicago Med Premiere: Hannah Deals Dean Some Tough Love — Grade It!
It's time to knock some sense into Dean Archer.
Picking up six months later, Chicago Med's Season 9 premiere finds the doc on the eve of his kidney transplant surgery. His son Sean is good to go for the procedure after falling off the wagon last season and using drugs. Dean tells Sean that he doesn't have to do this, and both men start apologizing to each other as Sean insists that he wants to donate. This is now the happiest day of his life, he adds.
But when a little girl with a failing transplanted kidney lands in the ED, Dean asks if Sean might be a match for her. (He's not.) Hannah overhears and pulls Dean aside to confront him. Dean admits that he doesn't think he deserves Sean's sacrifice since he was a terrible father. Hannah notes that what Sean wants now is not drugs but to have a real connection with his father.
"You feel unworthy, but if you deny Sean this, you will destroy him," Hannah says.
After that talking-to, the transplant is definitely on. And the little girl gets a kidney, too, courtesy of Hannah's braindead patient.
Elsewhere in the episode:
* Dr. Charles thinks the ED's new attending, Dr. Mitch Ripley (played Luke Mitchell), looks familiar, and it's not because he saw him on Blindspot, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Legacies, The Tomorrow People or countless other shows. When the newcomer mentions that they met 20 years ago, Charles digs up his old patient record for Mitch, who was a violent teenager with impulse control disorder who put another kid into the hospital. And Charles still has some concerns about Mitch, especially after he takes a patient off one of his bipolar meds, leading the man to have an episode. When Charles realizes that Mitch did that without a psych consult, he calls the decision reckless. "Do not treat me like the boy you knew 20 years ago," Mitch responds. Later, Charles tells Mitch that he's impressed with how he turned his life around, but Mitch isn't ready to forgive and forget. He suggests that Charles overmedicated him in juvie and then ditched him.
* Maggie confesses to Hannah that her husband Ben wants a divorce.
* The hospital has new owners who are even more business-type people than Jack Dayton, it seems. So when Crockett gets approval from Goodwin to use the benched 2.0 to operate on a boy who's been internally decapitated, both of their heads are also on the line if it goes south. Thankfully, the surgery is a success.
Med fans, what did you think of the season opener? Grade it below, then hit the comments!