Chicago Med showrunner confirms plans for Dominic Rains' exit (including whether he'll get an on-screen sendoff)

When Chicago Med returns for its tenth season on Sept. 25, it’ll do so without a beloved member of the cast. Ahead of the show’s season 10 premiere, One Chicago Center can confirm that Dominic Rains will not be returning in the season opener with Rains’ exit set to instead take place off-screen. 

“Dominic does not return at the top of season 10 and we explain his departure to you pretty quickly,” Chicago Med’s new showrunner Allen MacDonald shared of the plans for handling Rains’ exit from the series after five seasons playing Dr. Crockett Marcel. 

“The reason I decided to do that was just simply I felt that Dr. Crockett Marcel had already been written out at the end of last season," MacDonald elaborated on the decision for Crockett’s exit to unfold off-screen rather than with an on-screen sendoff in the season 10 premiere.  "It was left in a way that he could come back or if he left it, it was understandable that he had some issues of his own that he needed to work out in terms of his grieving process for the loss of his daughter. I didn't really feel there was a need to bring him back to write him out because I felt that had been done."

As disappointing as it might be to fans knowing that Rains’ will not make a cameo in the season 10 premiere to help send off his character, an on-screen exit truly wasn’t needed given where we left Crockett at the end of season 9. 

In the season 9 finale, Crockett learned the tragic news that his former patient – a young boy whose planned liver transplant was canceled due to an infection the boy contracted – had passed away and that the boy’s father, who had pleaded with Crocket not to cancel the transplant as doing so would mean a death sentence for his son, took his own life following his son’s passing.

The news hit Crockett hard as he was visibly shaken by the news and bailed on a scheduled surgery. He later confesses to Maggie that the news brought up his old feelings of helplessness which he faced when his daughter battled leukemia. Crockett realized in the moment that he never really took the time he needed to properly grieve the loss of his daughter, a moment that hinted that perhaps Crockett would be stepping away from medicine for a bit. 

While Rains will not be returning in the Chicago Med season 10 premiere for an on-screen send-off in the episode, there is still a hope that he could return sometime down the line. As MacDonald reminded us, Chicago Med is part of a larger world in which people come and go quite often, even hinting that he would definitely love to bring back some familiar faces when the time is right. 

“[The One Chicago Universe] is this big world of three shows and people come in and out of it. Specifically to Chicago Med, people come in and out of it because it is a world inhabited by characters and there are some from the past that have gone and we have new ones. There are no solid plans at the moment for this, but I'm very interested in bringing back characters from the past and seeing how they react to the characters they knew in the past, and with the new characters that we've added because I would love to see that and I think the audience would too.”

Chicago Med season 10 premieres Wednesday, Sept. 25 at 8/7c on NBC and streaming on Peacock.