SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Chicago Med Season 11, Episode 3. It also contains discussion of pregnancy loss.
The annual Chicago Med Halloween episode isn’t really much of one at all. There are some spooky elements to “What’s Hiding in the Dark,” but what stands out are some of the flaws that the NBC show already has. It amounts to a pretty unremarkable hour, despite the amusement that comes with seeing Dr. Mitch Ripley dressed up in a Tigger costume.
In fairness to this show, a ton of TV series do holiday episodes, and for the most part, they don’t work. The Halloween element in this one isn’t great either. Chicago Med uses the same nurse who thought Dr. John Frost was on drugs to tell Dr. Dean Archer that a treatment room is haunted. She’s still not funny, and the “ghost haunting someplace” bit is the easiest, most cliche of Halloween concepts. The script has more success when it stretches the theme a little further, in another story of a young child who is literally seeing people as monsters. That sounds over the top, but it becomes very emotional and it provides character development for the beloved Dr. Daniel Charles.
Charles is the foundation of Chicago Med at this point. It’s impossible to imagine the show without Oliver Platt; he is to this series what David Eigenberg is to Chicago Fire. Viewers just always expect them to be around, and they’re always good. “What’s Hiding in the Dark” brings up the idea of Charles’ potential retirement when his friends arrive to celebrate his 65th birthday and present him with custom golf clubs, suggesting that he might want to take a break. When Charles ends the episode in part by literally throwing the golf clubs into his office closet, it’s a cheer-worthy moment. The journey of how he helps Lucas not only with his medical condition but to hopefully stay with his foster family is a classic Charles story. The fact that it also involves Ripley—whom Charles helped in the past—is just icing on the cake.
But the rest of this episode struggles. It’s an odd choice to begin the hour with Dr. Caitlin Lenox’s latest random hookup; the writers have already established the changes in her personal life since her Prion disease diagnosis, and the scene doesn’t have any relevance to the main plotlines. It only comes back around again when her brother Kip also pays a visit to the hospital. Chicago Med would have been better off opening with something that was new, or at least grabbed viewers’ attention beyond the awkward humor of a delivery guy leaving Lenox’s apartment.
An even bigger problem exists in the storyline between Lenox and Dr. Hannah Asher, in which the two of them treat a college student who was pregnant and has suffered a miscarriage. Between Stella Kidd on Chicago Fire and this, that’s two miscarriage stories in five episodes. It’s also not the first time Chicago Med has gone to this plot well; fans will never forget nurse April Sexton’s miscarriage plotline. Of course there’s no rule that a medical drama can only tell one story about any subject, but it’s disheartening to see this theme repeat itself in relatively short order.
It doesn’t help that this subplot is more about figuring out what happened. Asher gets a moment with Jenny in the fourth act, but more focus on character would have made this story connect better. Instead, the plot is about finding Jenny’s missing baby—and as neat as it is to see Chicago PD star Marina Squerciati making an appearance, viewers can easily tell that story will have a tragic ending, so it’s just a lot of pain.
Speaking of Asher, she and Archer butt heads over his wanting to know the sex of their baby… not once, but twice. It feels like a trivial thing to argue about, yet it seems like hinting toward a bigger discrepancy in their approaches to parenting (because fans also had to expect that Chicago Med would throw some wrenches into that story). And Bert Goodwin may or may not be going the way of Charles’ mom and Dr. Sarah Reese’s dad, based on that cliffhanger ending. Another One Chicago recurring theme is that family members are often injured or killed off to create angst for the main characters, and “What’s Hiding in the Dark” does that for Sharon Goodwin.
Chicago Med gets points for not just doing a corny Halloween episode (aside from that bit about Treatment 5 being haunted). And this one is worth watching just for the performance of Oliver Platt in the storyline about Charles, Ripley and Lucas. This episode is reinforcement that Platt is key to keeping this show going. But other elements of Season 11, Episode 5 are less pleasant reminders. The writers can and have done much better.
Chicago Med airs Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Photo Credit: Courtesy of NBC.
