Chicago Med season 5, episode 11 recap: The Ground Shifts Beneath Us

Will’s bright idea

Will came into the hospital like it was any other normal day. He stopped and talked to Maggie, and he was beating himself over losing the mom last week. Will wondered “how many other people did he do this to?” How many other people had been affected by this drug crisis?

He wanted to solve that problem, so he proposed the idea of making Med a safe site for injections. A safe space where life-saving drug and treatment could help prevent deaths.

Sharon pitched Will’s idea of a safe injection site for drug treatments, but Gwen Garrett (Heather Headley) wasn’t having it. “It’d be a PR nightmare,” she said. Will still went ahead with the presentation, but he wasn’t successful in getting through to the board. Goodwin had an idea to bring in Dr. Charles, who told an anecdote of his brother, Tommy, who used drugs and alcohol.

Dr. Charles told them that he was the one who found his brother, who overdosed on heroin, minutes too late. So, if they would consider Dr. Halstead’s proposal of safe injection sites, they would be helping make sure that didn’t happen to someone else. Gwen announced that they  made a very compelling case, and she told them she had a good feeling.

Too bad Gwen had only used that as a bargaining chip, as earlier in the episode, she was the one in hot water. Natalie found Gwen’s 8-month-old son Devon nearly hypothermic after being left in the car. Gwen begged both Natalie and Sharon to keep it under wraps, as she had been going through a nasty custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband.

Sharon told her that she never meant for Will’s proposal to be accepted in exchange for her silence. Turned out Natalie beat her to the punch, and broke the news to Gwen’s husband anyway, He stormed out of the hospital with Devon in hand. When Gwen found out, she told Sharon that Will could forget about his project going through. She would make damn sure the board rejected it too.

When Will found out, he was disheartened, but not completely hopeless, as he had a friend who was starting his own off-the-books injection site. Dr. Charles warned Will, and worried that he could possibly lose his license if he got involved with something “not on the up-and-up.”

The last scene featured Will agreeing to go “all in” on this underground injection site clinic with his doctor friend. Could Will be making the biggest mistake of his life? And what about Ethan, April, and Crockett? Could the trio come to blows over her secret?

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.