Chicago Med season 5, episode 15 recap: I Will Do No Harm
Natalie and Charles
Natalie Manning treats a man experiencing some stomach pain, who tells her that he works with a lot of heavy metals in his job as a polymer engineer. So Natalie’s first thought is toxic exposure, but then the patient’s ex-wife Elaine interrupts and says her former husband is a liar. His real name is Derek Jordan, he’s an actor from New York, and they’re not actually married; she hired him to pretend to be her daughter’s father!
With this information in hand, Natalie confronts Derek to get a proper medical history, but he insists on continuing to play the character. That means Natalie has to call in Dr. Charles, though she probably shouldn’t tell one of the nurses in public, “This guy is nuts.”
Charles arrives and is equally befuddled. So is Elaine, who explains that Derek is a really Method actor. She freaks out when Natalie suggests they’ll have to call Child Protective Services if they don’t feel her daughter is safe. It’s all going to end soon enough, she insists, when she kills off the fake dad character in a work accident. That sounds like great parenting!
“If Derek knows that his character is going to die,” Charles theorizes, “is it really just a coincidence that he’s ended up in a hospital?”
Derek tells Charles that he disagrees with Elaine’s plan for getting rid of his character; instead, he wants “Lewis” to have a tragic death in front of Harper. He thinks it’s “closure” and he’s poisoned himself to accomplish it. This gets Natalie back up on her high horse, and she insists that Elaine needs to tell her daughter the truth so that Derek will stop this insane suicide plan.
Elaine agrees, but she’s unable to change Derek’s mind. As he goes into organ failure, Charles tries once again to reason with him, saying that they’ll help stage a fake death if he allows them to keep him from actually dying. Natalie is now annoyed with both of them. It’s truly heartbreaking as Chicago Med gives us the moment where a tearful Harper insists that he can’t die, while Natalie and Charles stand awkwardly by.
But seeing her grief, Derek changes his mind. He tells Charles and Natalie that he took cyanide and not to let him die for Harper’s sake. The little girl finally gets told the truth and takes it surprisingly well, asking to go see her not-dad.