Chicago Med season 4 midseason report: Daniel Charles

What it means

Writing out Dr. Reese at the start of the season changed the way that Chicago Med wrote for Dr. Charles. There was no way it wouldn’t, considering how closely the two had been tied together for the previous two seasons. What’s been surprising is that it hasn’t torpedoed his character.

There hasn’t been a ton of screen time for Charles, but that’s not necessarily a problem; without Reese, the episodes haven’t needed to find a specific psychiatry-themed patient every week. So the shorter amount of screen time is just a natural side effect of the show changing after losing a cast member. And he’s never been one of the more featured characters anyway, so it doesn’t feel that different.

Instead, we’ve seen Charles pop in and out of other stories, which has actually been great because audiences have watched him interact with other characters. While he would always do consults, it was usually with Reese or they’d end up taking over a case entirely. Now, Charles is playing off the likes of Natalie and Choi as more of a supporting character to their stories, and fans are seeing the relationships with those characters in more detail.

But if the aim of this season was to show Charles affected by Reese’s exit, we haven’t truly seen that yet. Aside from his brief blow-up at poor Terry McNeal, he has seemed pretty okay during the first nine episodes. Maybe that will change when the series returns? Will there be some kind of a delayed reaction when he needs Reese and she’s not there?