Chicago Med season 3, episode 19 recap: Crisis of Confidence

Did Chicago Med burn some bridges between characters or build them this week? Here’s what happened in Chicago Med season 3, episode 19.

Mixing medicine with personal has always been thorny for Chicago Med, and that was again the case with this week’s episode. So how difficult did things get, and could any of it be repaired?

Tuesday’s episode is called “Crisis of Confidence” and it begins with a much appreciated moment between the Halstead brothers. Will (Nick Gehlfuss) is shooting hoops with Jay (Jesse Lee Soffer) and assuring him everything is fine. Which is usually a sign something will not be fine.

Things are definitely not fine when Emily Choi (guest star Arden Cho) calls in her brother Ethan (Brian Tee) to help a guy who may have overdosed at a party she shouldn’t be at. Ethan has to do some emergency surgery on the spot with a vape pen. Way to go, Dr. Choi.

Back at the hospital, Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson) tells her nursing staff that a bunch of percoset went missing just like we said it would, and Dr. Daniel Charles (Oliver Platt) is getting an X-Files style envelope warning him about his protege’s father.

More from One Chicago Center

Sadly, Robert (recurring guest star Michel Gill) is still alive and seeming to be nice to Dr. Sarah Reese (Rachel DiPillo). But is he being genuine? He asks his daughter to get his mail and pick up a few things from his apartment, while Dr. Charles brings that weird envelope to Goodwin’s attention. The accusation is that Robert had something to do with the disappearances of multiple college students.

Uh-oh.

"Goodwin: You haven’t shared this with Dr. Reese yet, have you?Charles: Absolutely not."

Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) takes in a pregnant woman who randomly collapsed. She’s able to diagnose a potential heart problem, so you know who she’s calling!

But both our cardiothoracic surgeons are a little busy at the moment, practicing for their conjoined twin surgery with a highly detailed computer simulation. They accidentally kill both patients, which is not good before they go down to the ED together. We need both of them for this?

Anyway, Dr. Ava Bekker (Norma Kuhling) advocates for Natalie’s patient to have heart surgery, and that she should terminate her pregnancy beforehand because it could kill her otherwise. Tracy isn’t okay with this, since the baby is all she has left of her late husband.

She refuses, and the wheels in Dr. Connor Rhodes’ (Colin Donnell) head start turning. Seriously, thanks to Colin Donnell’s great expressiveness, you can literally see him formulating another risky yet genius plan that Ava will probably hate.

Watch One Chicago on fuboTV: Watch over 67 live sports and entertainment channels with a 7-day FREE trial!

He and Ava confer with Dr. Isidore Latham (recurring guest star Ato Essandoh). He thinks he can save both mother and child, and he’s determined to give it a shot to honor the patient’s wishes. Latham signs off on the idea, and Connor wheels Tracy up to surgery after Ava half-heartedly tells him good luck.

Of course, when they get to the operating room, Connor finds out that the size valve he needs is on backorder. That seems like the kind of information surgeons should be made aware of well in advance, like a memo or something? With no choice, he goes to Plan B with even greater risk.

Natalie moves on to help a young boy named Cody who seems to have a terrible case of the flu. Since he’s on Chicago Med, this is totally not the garden variety flu. As she and Will worry about that, Charles and Reese visit Robert’s apartment for the aforementioned mail errand. This is where we point out that the last time Charles was in someone’s apartment, it did not go well.

Charles sees a photo of Robert with one of the missing coeds, but doesn’t get to investigate more as Reese returns. He passes this new clue on to Goodwin, who once again suggests calling the police. But because this is not Chicago PD, the police do not really care.

Speaking of returning, Emily comes back to check on her friend Jeremy, who’s now stable in the Emergency Department. She thanks Ethan for saving him and goes off on her volunteer rounds, while April Sexton (Yaya DaCosta) chooses that moment to ask her boyfriend about the missing drugs and suggest Emily could have stolen them:

"April: The shoes she had on, do you know how expensive they are?"

Ethan points out that Emily’s friend overdosed on heroin not percoset, while Reese finds out that her dad has another visitor—the widow of the accident victim whose heart he received previously. This scene is only memorable for the awkward hug between the two women. Charles pops by later and goes through more of Robert’s stuff, getting more suspicious.

Chicago Med shifts downstairs where Will and Natalie have Cody on a ventilator and wonder what to do with his super-flu, as Jeremy takes a turn for the worse with a seizure. But when Choi looks at his labs, there is indeed one of the elements of percoset in his system. Acetaminophen is also in Tylenol, kids.

Choi tells April before deciding to confront his sister about what seems to be a now very real possibility that she’s the thief.

Connor’s surgery on Tracy goes well, so he takes his kudos from Latham and uses that to ask how things are going with the conjoined twins. Given what he just accomplished, he thinks he has the solution to their earlier problem. Latham suggests they test Connor’s theory and Connor has one of those big “I’m going to Disneyland” grins on his face.

"Connor: You know what they say. Fortune favors the bold."

Natalie is happy to hear that, before she runs over to Will and tells him that she thinks Cody has an undiagnosed condition. Without time to confirm or deny her idea, Will defers the final choice to her and she decides to change the course of treatment.

As Dr. Charles cuts out of the hospital to find Robert’s storage locker in Wisconsin, Connor’s kind of gloating to Ava, but that’s only before he finds out that Tracy has started to hemorrhage. Ava again argues for surgery, but Connor sticks to his guns even despite another “are you kidding me” look on her face.

However, Tracy’s new valve quickly begins to clot and she loses her pulse in the hallway. Connor will not admit that she’s dead, like he never does, until Tracy’s mother starts sobbing. The look of utter shock on Colin Donnell’s face makes the tag.

Choi finds Emily at Jeremy’s bedside. He tells her he’s sure that her friend OD’ed on percoset and that she may have stolen it. Emily denies the charge, and when Choi brings up what April said about her shoes, she correctly deduces it was April who was suspicious of her—and quits on the spot but not before giving the nurse a piece of her mind.

"Emily: You’ve got him all to yourself now."

Connor tries to comfort Tracy’s grieving mother, but she blames him for not agreeing with the first surgical recommendation. While she is literally pulled away, Natalie finds out that Cody is getting worse as well. But Will confirms that her gamble paid off: Cody has exactly what she thought he had.

Once he comes to, Jeremy tells Choi that he got his drugs from his father, not Emily. That makes Choi feel like an idiot for accusing Emily, and he sets off to apologize. But when he leaves, April is able to prove that Jeremy is lying, and Emily has blown out of Chicago to go back to Vegas.

But the worst is yet to come. Connor, shaken by what he just did, decides to step away from the conjoined twin surgery for fear of making another mistake. And we get Dr. Charles hanging out in a creepy storage locker, while Will contemplates asking Jay for the wedding ring he never used, in order to propose to Natalie. But will he really?!

You can look at “Crisis of Confidence” in two ways. The first is that it’s the final episode before next week’s Chicago Med season 3 finale. It pushes storylines that have been building for weeks along, as Charles continues to unravel the truth about Reese’s dad, and the conjoined twin surgery gets close to happening. It’s about time in both cases, but we’ve talked about the pacing of these plots in past recaps, so we’ll take that aspect as read.

The second is just to evaluate it on its own merits. In that sense, this episode of Chicago Med goes down paths that any regular viewer will recognize for each character. Natalie goes for what she’s sure is right over everyone else’s skepticism; Connor puts himself out on a limb to save his patient while Ava disapproves; Reese continues to see the best in the face of the worst. You know how it’s all going to unfold. And on TV, you never want to entirely know what’s going to happen.

The real drama in “Crisis of Confidence,” then, comes from the fallout of these characters doing what they normally do. You know that Connor’s loss will affect him deeply, because it is down to his misplaced courage that we lost one life instead of two—but at the same time, as he said, he was just trying to do what his patient wanted. That doesn’t make it okay, but we can’t blame him entirely either. And now it’s clouding his judgment when he could be needed most.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty obvious that Emily is the thief. That’s also very predictable, if only because Arden Cho is a guest star and therefore expendable, but it’s still disappointing. Why didn’t April tell Choi the full truth? Why is she now letting him live with this idea that he was wrong? And then we have the whole Reese and Charles storyline, which will have consequences for that partnership in many ways that we don’t even want to think about.

Everything’s a mess at the end of this episode, which is great if you’re trying to drum up some suspense for a season finale, but we also have to look (hopefully) toward a fourth season. And in that sense, “Crisis of Confidence” is a bit of a crisis unto itself.

Next: Meet Will and Jay Halstead's father

What did you think of this week’s Chicago Med? Leave your reaction to “Crisis of Confidence” in the comments.

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

Home/Chicago Med