Death has once again come knocking at Gaffney Medical, and this time it’s claimed the life of a key character in a twist we did not see coming.
Warning: The following post contains spoilers from Chicago Med season 10, episode 10, “Broken Hearts.”
Episode 10 was all about broken hearts in an episode that really hit viewers with the feels. We watched as a pair of conjoined twins successfully underwent separation surgery only for one of the twins to die from complications after coming off bypass. A budding romance came to a surprising end as Maggie broke things off with Loren. And then came the most unexpected gut punch: the death of Sully.
To be fair, we knew that Sully’s time was limited ever since we learned that he had terminal cancer. What we did not expect was that the show would kill Sully off in the most unexpected and tragic of ways.
At the beginning of the episode, we learned that Sully was recovering faster than his doctors expected from the spleen injury he sustained in prison that had sent him to Med. The only problem with this news was that in recovering so fast, Sully would be discharged and sent back to jail to continue his treatment.
Throughout the episode, Ripley does all he can to try to buy Sully extra time at Med by persuading Lennox to order additional scans. At one point, it seems his plan will not work out, and he goes to tell Sully the bad news. Only Sully isn’t somber or frustrated, he’s just happy to have been given the time to spend with his newborn son and girlfriend.
Lennox eventually has a change of heart and tells Ripley she’ll order the scans and Ripley is overwhelmed with relief and joy. He races off to tell Sully the good news only to be met by a distraught Lynn who informs Ripley through tears that Sully died from a blood clot while she was out of the room.
We have to tip our hats to the Chicago Med creative team as we did not see Sully’s death coming in the episode, and the way in which they approached the storyline left us reaching for the tissues with tears in our eyes.
When a character on a show is diagnosed with terminal cancer we know to begin preparing ourselves and typically you can get a sense of when the character’s time is coming to an end. However, we did not expect Sully’s death one bit. It was only after the moment happened that we were able to look back and see the writing was likely on the wall the entire time – especially after Sully told Ripley he was at peace and so grateful to have had the time with his son that he received.
Given how Ripley struggled with the idea of Ripley being discharged back to jail, we imagine his friend’s death is going to hit him hard in the episodes ahead. With the crossover coming next week, it’s unlikely we’re going to get to see the immediate fallout explored in episode 11, but we hope the show allows Ripley the opportunity to work through his grief and look forward to seeing how he handles the loss of his friend.