We're back in Chicago for another round of new seasons with the One Chicago franchise, and if there's one thing we can always count on from premiere night, it's a busy revolving door of character exits and introductions. Chicago Med season 12 has already had its fair share of comings and goings, including one that most fans probably didn't even have on their radar.
Obviously, there were already two exits in particular that we were anticipating in Chicago Med season 12 episode 1. Due to Sarah Ramos' maternity leave, Dr. Lenox will be offscreen on a three-month sabbatical for a secret drug trial in Zurich. While Ramos is expected to miss at least five episodes, Lenox made a surprise appearance in the season 12 premiere to establish her temporary leave.
Additionally, Ashlei Chestnut Sharpe departed Chicago Med after recurring for a couple season, though Dr. Naomi Howard's exit wasn't mentioned or addressed in the premiere episode. As it turns out, Naomi's disappearing act wasn't the only one that went unnoticed at the start of the new season. Asher's replacement doctor at the emergency department also vanished.
Chicago Med wrote out Asher's replacement Dr. Lovell without explanation
In Chicago Med season 11 episode 5, titled "What's Hiding in the Dark?," we met Dr. Vera Lovell, another OB-GYN at Gaffney. The doctor was played by Abby Corrigan and appeared in four episodes of season 11, including episode 17 ("Altered States"), in which Asher disagreed with Lovell taking over as her replacement in the ED during her maternity leave.
Lovell appears again in the last two episodes of season 11 as Asher goes into labor during the hospital's hostage crisis. She had previously helped another mother deliver her baby, and Asher also begins labor for her own birth. Despite her reservations about Lovell and her more eccentric methods and bedside manner, Asher trusts Lovell to help deliver Mabel safely.
However, Lovell is nowhere to be found in the Chicago Med season 12 premiere, almost as if she had never even existed. If you had forgotten that Asher had a temporary replacement during her maternity leave, you're not the only one. Lovell wasn't a popular character to keep on the radar while tracking character exits and additions, but the show not even mentioning her didn't help.
Asher returns to Gaffney to pay her coworkers a visit and deliver sustenance to Archer with Mabel in tow, but she's quickly pulled into the wedding shooting case. She's still on maternity leave, but Lovell isn't at Gaffney to jump into the case and it's not clear why. By the end of the premiere, Asher decides that she's ready to return to work, which is easy to do since Lovell is no longer filling in (apparently).
For some fans, Lovell no longer being part of the cast won't be much of a disappointment since the reaction to her character was as mixed as Asher's. Plus, season 12 has also added An-Li Bogan as Dr. Annie Wu, a new doctor whose role wasn't explicitly explained, and Rebecca Breeds as Mallory Sloan, Gaffney's new administrator taking over for Goodwin during the HIPAA investigation.
It's yet another curious case of disappearing Gaffney staff, as Maggie vanished without explanation last season and Naomi is gone now, too. There's still time for season 12 to explain what happened to Naomi, and perhaps Lovell will pop back up in a future episode. But if she doesn't, she will be another character who was written out without actually being written out.
Watch Chicago Med on Wednesdays at 8/7c on NBC and next-day on Peacock.
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