Chicago Med Season 12, Episode 5 ‘Baptism by Fire‘ was one of the most emotional episodes of the show, the kind of hour that grabs you emotionally and never lets you go. It’s a hard hour to watch, and certainly not for everyone, but it’s also the kind that serves as a reminder that as much as this story is fictional for us and for these characters, it’s sadly not for way too many women and girls.
The hour does very little to advance anyone’s plots outside of new Chief Resident Annie Wu (An-Li Bogan). And yet, it does a very good job with her, to the point that she goes from frankly unlikeable in the first few episodes to someone you are, at the very least, interested in knowing more about. And as well as that works for the audience, it works almost better for Dr. Frost (Darren Barnet).
Of course, the problem with Annie wasn’t that the show hadn’t given us glimpses of an interesting character; it’s that we didn’t know enough about what was behind the facade to care. Now, we still don’t know the full story, but we know there’s enough for her to relate to the victims in this case. And not only do we know it, but Frost does too.
To Doctor Wu, John Frost probably looks like the kind of guy who’s had an easy life. He hasn’t, and we know that, but she has yet to discover it. Their trauma might not be similar, but they both carry a lot of it. And that’s likely something we’re going to see the show explore. When she was first introduced, right after the way the show wrote off Naomi (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut), I wasn’t sure I cared. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Now, I will try to keep an open mind.
If anything, the Chief Resident thing just adds a new wrinkle to the conversation, because there just aren’t enough doctors on this show for this to actually be a thing we cared about, but from the little we’d seen, then yes, Dr. Wu does seem like a better choice. But is she? She could do with Frost’s personability, at times. And she’s not great at playing with others.
Can she learn? We’re likely about to explore just that. If the show wants us to root for her, though, we’re going to need more than this temporary ceasefire with Frost. We’re going to need to see more of how she and the new ED Chief, Mitch Ripley (Luke Mitchell), can work together. Because we know Ripley is not a fan. This episode is a lot of promise for the character, but the journey is just starting.
As for the rest, I wish we didn’t have hours like this one, because I wish the stories that inspired episodes like ‘Baptism by Fire’ didn’t exist. They sadly do. And there are worse things to do than bringing awareness to that fact.
Chicago Med Season 12 airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.
