Chicago Med season 11, episode 16, “The Book of Charles,” put the spotlight on Oliver Platt’s Dr. Daniel Charles in an episode that featured Charles in every scene of the episode. With Charles taking center stage, we knew we were in store for an amazing episode, but we weren’t quite prepared for how intense the episode ended up being.
Over the course of the episode, Charles was truly put through the wringer. The episode opened with Charles working at a suicide prevention center trying to help a young man who called in expressing thoughts of self-harm after the loss of his girlfriend, who died in a car accident in which he was behind the wheel. Charles tried to talk him down, but the young man hung up, and the call haunted him through the episode.
With the call hanging over him, Charles did not face an easy day going through a series of complicated cases. The most difficult of the cases involved a woman who he diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome, a mental health condition in which an individual acts as if they have an illness or harm themselves in an effort to seek medical attention and garner sympathy and attention. After being diagnosed, the woman refused to accept Charles’ diagnosis and ended up drinking drain cleaner, sending her to the ER with her life on the line.
Somehow, that wasn’t the most shocking moment of the episode. No, that moment came in the closing moments of the episode when Charles collapsed on his office floor, and we’d come to learn via the promo that he had a stroke.
Heading into episode 17, fans are eager to see if Charles will survive this brush with death, and we have a pretty good feeling he will. While there have been some shocking deaths on Chicago Med over the years, the show is no Grey's Anatomy and hasn't really ever killed a major doctor off the show outside of Dr. Ava Bekker, whose death was one of the most out-of-pocket moments in the show's history.
Should Charles indeed survive, there is one storyline we need the show to finally drop once and for all.
Chicago Med needs to stop teasing Charles' exit or commit to writing him out of the show
If there is one thing that "The Book of Charles" proved, it's time for the show to put up or shut up. All season long (and honestly going back to at least season 10 as well), the series has been flirting with the idea of Charles leaving Med and pursuing other opportunities, most recently the teaching position Howie recommended him for. As we enter the home stretch of the season, Charles' near-death experience needs to resolve this ongoing tease of him exiting one way or another, as we're getting tired of the same storyline being played on repeat for Charles.
We hate the idea of losing Oliver Platt from the core ensemble, but if he feels it's time to move on or the show feels it's in the best interest of the show to shake things up, there has never been a better time to pull the trigger on the story. While Charles might not have been interested in the teaching position, we know he would be an amazing professor because we know how incredible he is at mentoring young doctors. This would be such a natural progression for the character, and it would not be out of left field for him to leave Gaffney for this position.
However, if the show is not sending Charles away and he's going to turn down the teaching position, we need the show to also drop this will-he, won't-he storyline of always making fans wonder if Charles has one foot out the door at Gaffney.
Charles is such a complex and incredible character, as "The Book of Charles" proved, and we need to stop wasting the character on a storyline built on him questioning his future in medicine at Gaffney. We'd much rather see him spending that time via storylines that further explore the strains of his job and his relationships with his daughters and colleagues, and through treating patients and solving medical mysteries.
We'd also love to see more of Charles and Theo working cases together and challenging one another to think outside the box through their unique treatment approaches.
With the right storytelling choices, we could one day see Theo taking over the department and succeeding Charles, but it feels like now is not the right time for this storyline to be told. Plus, when that day comes, it would be much more interesting to see Theo given the position while Charles is still working at Gaffney so that the show could explore the conflicts and shifts that come in their dynamic from the role reversals.
Whatever the future holds for Charles following this brush with death, we just hope that it no longer includes questioning his future at Gaffney on a near weekly basis. Let's put that to bed once we get past this storyline.