Doc had a big premiere, and its EP is answering the question of whether the central character will get back what she’s lost!
Caution: This article contains SPOILERS for the series premiere of Doc
Based on an Italian show, Doc premiered on Fox on Tuesday, Jan. 7. The opening scenes establish Doctor Amy Larsen (Molly Parker) as a brilliant surgeon but also a cold woman who cuts down underlings and is carrying on an affair with a younger doctor, Jake (Jon Ecker). She also suspects her colleague Dr Richard Miller (Scott Wolf) botched a procedure that killed a patient.
What happened to Amy in Doc?
While driving home, Amy makes the mistake of looking at her phone for a test result and gets into a crash. When she wakes up in the hospital, she has retrograde amnesia and thinks it’s still 2016.
It’s more than a rude awakening for Amy as she learns her entire life has changed. Her young son died of a heart condition, which caused her to turn off her feelings to others. That led to divorcing her husband Michael (Omar Metwally) and becoming this colder woman. It also means that Miller takes over her job as department chief while relieved Amy no longer remembers his earlier botched surgery.
The pilot ended with Amy bound and determined to get back into her surgical life, unaware of her relationship with Jake or the tiny detail Michael was now remarried with a child on the way. Speaking to TV Insider, showrunner Barbie Kligman shared some insight into what’s coming for Amy in her journey, starting with what happens when she discovers Michael has remarried.
"It’s big when she finds out. Michael knows he should tell her, but for obvious reasons he can’t bring himself to, and Gina [Amirah Vann] wants her to know but knows it’s not her place to tell her. And so it’s a minute before she finds out because there’s also the issue of, she’s going through all this trauma, how much can you put on her right away?"
Thus, Gina and Michael will want to walk Amy through things. That’ll be complicated by Richard, who’s naturally gleeful he gets her job and Amy doesn’t remember whatever he did. That will become a key plotline for the season.
"For a period, Richard absolutely thinks he’s in the clear, but there is a part of him that is worried. With a brain injury, you just don’t know. Her memories could come back at any time or never…So Richard’s always going to have it in the back of his mind. And I will say that there’s a tendency in life when you stop worrying about things for them to rear their ugly heads."
Kligman shared that a key character arc will be how Amy will continue to treat Richard as a close friend when he remembers they’ve been at odds for years. That runs the risk of Amy slowly putting together what happened. This leads to the key question of the show: Will Amy ever regain her memory?
Will Amy regain her memories?
Another big question is on Jake, who had confessed to Amy he was in love with her, and she responded in kind before the accident. Obviously, working with the woman you love when she has no memory of ever meeting you is going to be a serious challenge.
"That’s another really interesting thing because whenever he’s in her presence, he’s thinking about what they had and experiencing the pain of her not remembering. When she’s in his presence, I think it doesn’t take long for her to feel a connection, but she doesn’t really understand that connection."
That sets up what will no doubt be the big arc if Amy regains her memories of the last eight years. Kligman explained they want to handle it realistically, with Amy perhaps getting flashes of that period in brief bits, which is more likely than it all rushing back at once.
There’s also a touch in that Amy may not want to have those memories back. Gina said she now has a chance to start fresh without all that pain, and Amy may be better off not recalling the grief over losing her son or her terrible attitude to others. Yet that made her the person she is, and one can’t pick and choose what to remember.
“It’s something she wants desperately to happen, and she is doing the treatments to try to get it to happen, but she’s also trying to get her life back. So at the same time, she’s focused on getting ready to take the boards and she wants desperately to pass them again because she wants to be an actual doctor again at this hospital rather than a medical student. Because it’s truly one of the only things she feels she has left, and it was such a big part of her life, and she’s not willing to let that go.”
Episode 2 will focus on Amy trying to get back to work and her new persona throwing people off. The memory issue will be a recurring theme yet it seems that the viewers, like Amy, will be handling the loss of her memories slowly as Doc continues.
Doc airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on Fox.