Chicago Med season 6 premiere takeaways: When Did We Begin To Change

Chicago Med season 6, episode 1 breakdown.

What did One Chicago fans learn from the latest Chicago Med episode? Here’s what we took away from this week’s installment, “When Did We Begin To Change.”

“When Did We Begin To Change” featured Dr. Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) having major issues in his relationship, while the rest of the hospital dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic in various ways.

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) Will and Hannah are the new Connor and Robin

Will and Dr. Hannah Asher (recurring guest star Jessy Schram) are no more—but their breakup gave us serious flashbacks to another Chicago Med couple.

To wit: after spending season 5 focusing on Will and Hannah’s relationship and her seemingly making a recovery, then she had a relapse, decided to leave town, and in the same episode Will met someone else (the new recurring character played by Tehmina Sunny).

Let’s remember that after spending season 2 focusing on Robin and Connor’s relationship and her seemingly being okay, season 3 brought back her issues, then had her decide to leave town, while Connor had already met Ava Bekker (Norma Kuhling), who quickly became his new girlfriend.

This feels like another situation where Chicago Med spends a lot of time getting itself and the fans invested in a relationship, and then moves on when it comes up with another idea. There might not be a lot of fans heartbroken about Hannah, since the way she got together with Will felt off to begin with, but it’d be cool if the writers kept some storylines between seasons.

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2) Were April’s racism comments a bit random?

April Sexton (Yaya DaCosta) dropped a bomb when she explained why she was working so many shifts in the COVID-19 ICU. She went off on Dr. Ethan Choi (Brian Tee) about racial discrimination, not just in the healthcare industry, before adding that she didn’t want to leave her patients alone.

First things first: April does have a point about racial inequality in healthcare. That’s a subject that would be great for Chicago Med to discuss at some point, perhaps with a case of the week.

But to have her just throw it out there felt incredibly random, and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of this episode. It was reminiscent of how Dr. Natalie Manning (Torrey DeVitto) made Will sound sexist for coming to her defense a few seasons ago.

If April had just said she didn’t want to leave her patients alone, that would have been more than enough. But by her starting with that, it creates the impression that she’s first concerned about them because they’re African-American, which is a confusing message to send too.

And since it never came up again, it’s hard to grasp what the point was. If there had been more about it, like April accusing Lanik of being racist, or Lanik actually being racist, then that would have made a lot of sense. Speaking of which…

3) How will Choi fare replacing Lanik?

SPOILER ALERT: The promo for next week’s Chicago Med shows Choi being named Emergency Department chief, meaning that Dr. James Lanik has either quit or was fired (and despite how we never liked his character, let’s take a moment to say goodbye to Nate Santana, who put a lot of time into this show).

It’ll be interesting to see what the reasoning is for Lanik not being there, and how Choi will do in his position. Choi is the most likely of the main characters to get promoted, since he’s usually one of the most stable characters (last season aside). But how will he do in a role he didn’t seem like he wanted?

Are we going to have a situation similar to Casey on Chicago Fire, where his colleagues have to get used to him giving them orders? And will this make any potential reunion with April even more of a question mark, since now he’s in charge of the entire ED? This is a cool story idea for sure, but let’s see how it develops, because it could also get convoluted.

For the latest Chicago Med season 6 spoilers and news, plus more on the entire series, follow the Chicago Med category at One Chicago Center.