Chicago Med season 3, episode 8 recap: Lemons and Lemonade

The doctors and nurses of Chicago Med fight some uphill battles in this week’s episode. Here’s what happened in Chicago Med season 3, episode 8.

This week’s Chicago Med was a battle for several people to get back to normal, but were they able to get there or did things just get more complicated? It depends on how you look at it.

Season 3, Episode 8 is called “Lemons and Lemonade,” and begins with Dr. Connor Rhodes (Colin Donnell) putting some miles on his brand-new Porsche, but he looks entirely unenthused about it. There is something not right with this guy.

Connor makes it to work—hey, the hospital has a valet—and immediately gets looked at by a new random woman, whom he decides to start a conversation with. Yeah, he’s not wasting any time on rebounding.

At the Manning household, Dr. Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) is trying desperately to bond with his girlfriend’s son Owen and gets whacked in the face instead, while Dr. Ethan Choi (Brian Tee) finds the morning coffee run interrupted by a medical crisis: a collapsed woman he literally carries into the ED.

The woman is hypothermic, and when Choi gets a closer look at her, it’s clear that she’s anorexic. That’s double the issues to worry about, but Allison is in excellent hands with our hospital’s most relentless doctor.

Will gets to work and finds out that Maggie Lockwood (Marlyne Barrett) is still short-handed, but enlists her help on a stand-up comic with a seemingly mundane back injury. And Dr. Sarah Reese (Rachel DiPillo) is officially back to work, after counseling, anger management and even a session with the hospital attorney.

With Dr. Daniel Charles (Oliver Platt) needed for Choi’s patient, Reese gets the psych case of the episode, a woman who cannot stop rambling. Welcome back to Chicago Med, Dr. Reese!

Frankly, she’s better off, because “Lemons and Lemonade” gives us a downright disturbing scene in which Charles is literally bargaining with Allison as to how many calories she’ll allow him to have administered to her. Only Oliver Platt could pull something like this off, but it’s still so hard to even watch.

The only person we haven’t checked in with is Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto), whose patient has a severe sore throat and could be infected. It’s another one of those “went on vacation, came back with a mystery illness” plots. Based on Chicago Med, none of us should ever go on a vacation again.

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But this is the part of the episode where everyone’s cases get more complicated. Will sees a blip in the comic’s scans that makes him call Connor for help one more time, and Connor tells her (and us) that she actually has cancer. Dammit, Rhodes, why are you so negative this week? But at least the tumor is operable.

And Choi, for the second time this season, disagrees with Dr. Charles’ treatment plan, but Charles convinces him that they need to earn Allison’s trust first and foremost:

"Charles: We can’t afford to make any mistakes here."

But just as they prepare to start administering treatment, Allison rips the tube out and declares that she’s done. Not only that, but she insists on getting a lawyer to prevent them from helping her any further. Do you think Choi’s going to take that sitting down, though?

Connor and Dr. Ava Bekker (Norma Kuhling) operate on Will’s patient, while Ava confirms that her colleague did actually hit on the woman at the start of the episode. Why does she feel like the OR is the right place to have all these personal conversations? Anyway, they’re able to remove the tumor without any issues. But don’t celebrate yet: the patient complains of leg pain afterward, which both Connor and Will both know is no side effect.

Back downstairs, while a police report helps Maggie identify Reese’s patient and her sister, April Sexton (Yaya DaCosta) finds out that Natalie’s patient is going into septic shock. He doesn’t have a staph infection; he’s got a superbug that “lives in hospitals,” and April theorizes that he got it from his significant other, who just spent time in another hospital for pneumonia.

And Choi is pissed off that the hospital lawyers don’t plan to fight Allison’s legal directive to leave her alone. It doesn’t make him feel any better when Charles points out that after a decade and a half, Allison probably wouldn’t have much shot at a full recovery anyway.

It’s no surprise when Allison eventually dies.

In the psychiatric division, Reese explains to Charles that her patient is Jamie, a former aspiring chef who impulsively started reading the Bible and writing a manifesto, and wants to have her admitted. Charles, however, isn’t convinced and wants to second-guess her work.

He points out a sign she missed—the rings in her patient’s eyes—and thinks she has a genetic disorder where copper accumulates in the body. All those copper pots and pants at cooking school did her no favors, and Charles takes Reese to task for not figuring out the real cause of her illness.

Worse than that, Connor, Will and their colleagues in oncology confirm that Will’s patient’s cancer had already metastasized some time ago. They develop a treatment plan, but that means money, so Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson) isn’t interested. Will and Connor join forces to argue how dumb that is, but she won’t listen.

"Goodwin: What kind of dream world are you living in?"

Chicago Med starts the fourth act of “Lemons and Lemonade” with a truly depressed Will having to take the paramedics upstairs to transfer his patient to another hospital. Both he and Connor get to sulk, until Connor decides he’s not gonna take it and tells the medics to put her back. Will asks what he’s doing; Connor tells him “I’ve got this.”

We find out that an anonymous donation was made to the hospital to cover the patient’s needs, and Goodwin makes clear she knows he came up with the money himself. Because he’s a boss, no matter what else is going on with him.

But things are much more grim downstairs. Natalie has to tell her patient’s girlfriend that she’s so infected with the superbug that there’s no help and she’s going to have it forever. The news breaks her heart and she decides that she’d rather leave her boyfriend than infect him again. And Reese is so upset that she screwed up that she’s in tears again.

Hey, at least we saw Owen again, though! And no, Will, Owen does not hate you. Relax. Breathe. Your day has been terrible anyway, so have a cute baby.

After all the information that was dropped in last week’s episode, Chicago Med aims to push a few stories forward this week. Some are successful; others not so much.

The best part of “Lemons and Lemonade” comes from watching Will and Connor work together on a patient. The whole “frenemy” aspect of their relationship hasn’t really been explored after the first season, but they’re still very different personalities, and that makes it fun when they do agree on something.

Plus, it’s always a good time when Connor flexes his proverbial muscle, because it is so him. It’s good to see that he’s still able to do the right thing at work, even as we have to scratch our heads about his personal life now (see below).

Less successful is how Reese gets to come back to work, but there’s not much talk about how she is; we hear all these things that she went through, but it feels like a missed opportunity to see any of them (and understand her journey better). Instead, we get a fairly rote “did she come back too soon?” story. It’s not that interesting until the end, when she asks for Charles’ help, and that’s because Rachel DiPillo continues to kill it.

And while we’re admittedly biased because we’re Connor Rhodes fans over here, watching him go through the classic signs of a mid-life crisis in this episode is still kind of cringe-worthy. We want better for him, and we expect better from him, then acting out in the way everyone else might do. But, if this is the start of a serious story about how he needs some help of his own, we’ll take our lumps for now. Click the link below to see where we think Connor is headed after this.

Next: Is Chicago Med's Connor Rhodes breaking down?

What did you think of this week’s Chicago Med episode? Leave us your reaction to “Lemons and Lemonade” in the comments.

Chicago Med airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on NBC.