SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Doc Season 2, Episode 1. It also contains a mention of suicide.

The Doc Season 2 premiere takes a well-worn page out of the medical drama playbook. Wanting to build on the FOX show’s first-season momentum, “Her Heart” is a dramatic story that offers very little new. But by playing it so familiar, the writers do accomplish moving Dr. Amy Larsen’s individual arc forward.

Doc Season 1 ended with Amy’s carefully reconstructed world coming apart again, when she discovered the truth about what happened to Bill Dixon and her new boyfriend Dr. Jake Heller caught her having an emotional moment with her ex-husband, Dr. Michael Hamda. Everyone’s relationships are still frayed when the Season 2 premiere picks up a short time later; both Jake and Dr. Gina Walker aren’t speaking to Amy. And Dr. Richard Miller, who faced the music for the Dixon situation, is still definitely gone (which is a loss for Doc with the absence of Scott Wolf, but not for the characters at Westside Hospital). The show’s way of resolving all of this is by utiliing a TV staple: creating a life-threatening situation that forces everybody to put their personal issues aside.

Countless television shows have used a traumatic event to prompt characters to reveal or resolve their feelings for one another. It’s a tried and true staple for a reason; it creates both excitement through action and at least one big emotional moment. In the case of Doc, though, it works less well because the choice of plotline is one that medical dramas have done for literal decades. A family member taking violent action to enable a transplant for their ill loved one is too familiar.

Chicago Hope did it best in the 1995 episode “Life Support,” in which a man held a donor heart hostage before dying by suicide in order to provide a new heart for his brother. More recently, the Chicago Med installment “Heavy Is the Heart” in 2016 featured a man who shot himself to ensure that his child received a kidney. Doc is traveling the same thematic path, and it doesn’t do so as well as the stories that have come before it. The big emotional moments, for example, are mostly handled in one montage, where a pop song needle drop is meant to evoke feelings instead of actually letting the audience experience that payoff.

What the Doc Season 2 premiere does accomplish in a roundabout way is getting everyone to make up, which is obviously necessary for the show to move forward. All of the baggage from Season 1 has to be cleared out of the way to make room for new ideas. Amy makes up with Jake and Gina, while Michael’s wife Nora delivers their baby seven weeks early. The almost expected last scene plot twist is that Amy has started to recover memories, so she wants to start further treatment—which will provide the backbone of Season 2 in the way that the Dixon mystery recurred throughout Season 1. Plus, there’s only so much mileage Doc can get out of Amy not recalling her past; she has to move forward from a medical standpoint, too.

Coming just one day after the return of Brilliant Minds, the Doc Season 2 premiere reinforces that this is a more relationship-driven medical drama, where characters’ entanglements and personal challenges are just as prominent as the cases of the week. It’s interesting to see the contrast with the NBC medical drama, which has its own protagonist with a medical condition in Dr. Oliver Wolf, but focuses a little more on the quirky cases that Wolf and his team have to deal with. Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong; there are more flavors to the medical drama than fans may realize, and it’s up to the viewer which type they like.

Doc continues to feature an excellent performance from Molly Parker, as it toys with the idea that “Old Amy” was in fact superior to “New Amy” in some ways, as opposed to Season 1 mostly showing how difficult Amy could be. Aside from Parker and Jon Ecker—whose Jake gets the powerful speech that essentially explains the whole theme of the episode—the rest of the cast doesn’t have very much to do dramatically other than speak urgently to one another.

Patrick Walker makes an early exit when Dr. TJ Coleman is shot in the leg, and the first look trailer for Season 2 reveals that he survives his injury but his recovery will also be incorporated into the season. Hopefully that’s not all the series focuses on, as TJ became one of the most interesting characters by the end of Season 1. Doc restarts with a bang yet that means not having as much time or space to explore the people caught up in the hostage situation. “Her Heart” is dramatic and drops audiences back into Amy’s world successfully—but for all the sound and fury, it feels like it’s just scratching the surface.

Doc airs Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. on FOX. Photo Credit: Courtesy of FOX.

Article content is (c)2020-2025 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.