Chicago Med season 5, episode 5 takeaways: Got A Friend In Me
What can Chicago Med fans learn from Got A Friend In Me? Look closer at this week’s episode with our Chicago Med season 5, episode 5 takeaways.
What did One Chicago fans learn from the latest Chicago Med episode? Here’s what we took away from this week’s installment, “Got A Friend In Me.”
“Got A Friend In Me” featured Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) resorting to extreme measures when a patient’s parents refused treatment. Meanwhile, Maggie Lockwood (Marlyne Barrett) was finally able to confide in her colleagues about having cancer.
If you missed any of this week’s episode or just want a refresher on the events that we’re about to discuss, you can catch up with our Chicago Med recap.
Below are our takeaways from this week’s episode:
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1) There were too many stories
Chicago Med crammed too many plotlines into this episode, and it showed. There was Natalie’s story, and the B-story between Dr. Ethan Choi (Brian Tee) and Dr. Crockett Marcel (Dominic Rains). That would have been fine.
But then there was also Maggie’s treatment story, Dr. Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) treating a patient, Dr. Daniel Charles (Oliver Platt) sort of treating a patient, and more of Charles with Caroline (returning guest star Paula Newsome). That’s seven plotlines in one 42-minute episode.
No wonder a few of them felt undeveloped and/or added little to the episode. The writers would do better to focus their attention on two, maybe three, stories—they don’t need to service every character in every episode. Otherwise, what fans get is an overstuffed episode where nothing really has the chance to sink in.
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2) Natalie has officially lost it
Natalie is probably going to get suspended and/or sued after this episode, and she absolutely deserves it. “Got A Friend In Me” took her biggest character flaw—that she does what she thinks is best, no matter what anyone else says or wants—and ramped it up to the extreme, ending with Natalie locking herself in a patient’s treatment room while his parents and security were outside trying to get in.
Chicago Med fans know that Dr. Manning has always been a bit egotistical, but this time the show may have had her cross the biggest line yet. The question is how severe will the consequences be? Is she really going to have to face the music for her actions, or will the writers let her off the hook because the ends justify the means? Sometimes One Chicago is prone to that rationalization; we see it on Chicago PD all the time.
But if the series wants to be serious with this story, then we need to see Natalie in serious trouble next week.
3) This show misses Connor
If you’ve been reading this site long enough, you know that we were all big fans of Dr. Connor Rhodes (Colin Donnell). But even taking that into consideration, “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” really highlighted, unintentionally, how much Chicago Med lost by getting rid of Connor.
The plotline between Choi and Marcel was cringe-worthy at times, mostly in how Marcel and Noah Sexton (guest star Roland Buck III) were blatantly scouting for surgical cases in the ED, and how smug Marcel got when pushing for surgery.
That highlighted the massive difference between Marcel and the character he replaced; Connor would have disagreed with Choi in a professional, and more amenable, way. He would have been respectful of Choi and his patient, and tried to collaborate instead of going right to conflict. He certainly wouldn’t have been lurking around the ED looking for patients to work on.
And that was another example of how this show has changed this season—now, instead of characters we can always root for even when they disagree, we’ve got characters we sometimes can’t root for at all.
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For the latest Chicago Med season 5 spoilers and news, plus more on the entire series, follow the Chicago Med category at One Chicago Center.