Chicago Med season 5, episode 18 recap: In the Name of Love

Natalie and Crockett

Natalie treats a man named Nick who’s suffering from severe abdominal pain. But that turns out to be just the start of a long list of problems: he’d been treated previously for colorectal cancer, and gone through multiple rounds of chemotherapy. “I’ve got four months left at the most,” he tells Natalie.

Crockett overhears Natalie asking for a surgical consult and decides that he’ll volunteer, since he has “nowhere to be until cocktail hour.” And what he tells Nick does not mesh up with Natalie’s plan for his treatment. She’s never even heard of what he’s proposing; he has to explain it, and then she wants to know why he’d want to do a radical surgery on a patient who will ultimately die. He replies that most of Nick’s previous surgeons are “gutless.” Ouch.

Natalie stalks up to him later and points out that he has a vested interest in the procedure; he’s written a study on it and worked at the place that developed it, and she thinks he just wants to do the surgery to make his career look good. “I answer to my patients, not to you,” Crockett replies. Ouch, again.

Unable to get him to change his mind, Natalie decides to try and pressure Nick’s wife Alice, who admits that she also isn’t comfortable with the surgery. However, she tells Natalie that it’s what her husband wants.

So Chicago Med takes us into the operating room for maybe 30 seconds, then cuts to Crockett telling both women that Nick has pulled through the surgery. After Nick and Alice joke about not naming their baby Crockett, poor Nick crashes and dies, because this is the One Chicago franchise and we love our angsty plot twists.

Naturally, Alice blames Crockett, at least by the look on her face. Crockett broods again, this time in the locker room until Natalie shows up to try and reassure him. For someone who was pushing him every step of the way, she’s surprisingly sympathetic as he beats himself up. “With new surgery, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more lives you’ll save,” she insists.

And then Crockett’s apparent girlfriend walks into the room looking for him. Who even knew he had a girlfriend?! And why doesn’t she have a name? And does Natalie care?