Chicago Med season 5, episode 13 takeaways: Pain Is For The Living

3. Did we not see enough Marcel?

The scene: Dr. Crockett Marcel treats a young woman who’s been involved in a vicious car accident and takes Lucy immediately to the hybrid OR. However, he’s ultimately unable to find the source of her internal bleeding, and she dies on the operating table. Marcel does eventually figure out the truth (that Lucy was also shot by a stray bullet that some random person shot into the air), but the storyline ends in an awkward and underwhelming way when Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) notices Marcel is off and casually asks if he’s all right.

The takeaway: This felt like a storyline that was pushed into this Chicago Med installment just to give Dominic Rains something to do, and it showed. Lucy isn’t even brought into the Emergency Department until the episode is well underway, and her death happens relatively quickly after she is introduced. Now, the plot comes with good intentions; it wants us to see Marcel stymied, to see him grieve. But the scene where he finds out he’s wrong is so rushed, and it doesn’t last long at all; it’d have been so much greater if we stretched that out a bit and had to live in his panic and freak out along with him.

And it’s also not clear what the end goal was supposed to be. Natalie asks if Marcel is okay, but their interaction lasts maybe 30 seconds. He offers a brief answer and puts on a brave face. She doesn’t push. He doesn’t open up to her or have a moment where we can really feel his pain. It’s great that Chicago Med wants to continue to humanize Crockett (based on his original character description when Chicago Med season 5 started, he sounded like he was going to be insufferable), but it has to let the storyline breathe and then ultimately build it to something.

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