Well, that was bizarre.
I wasn’t happy when I read that The Good Doctor Season 4 Episode 7 featured Morgan’s patient going too far with his health obsession. I figured we were in for a Morgan-centered hour, and five minutes of her is more than I can stand.
It turned out that Morgan wasn’t featured nearly as heavily as the description suggested, but what we got instead wasn’t much better.
The cases the doctors worked on could have been compelling if they hadn’t been used to make philosophical points about the nature of change and suggest that relationships are not made to last more than a few years.
Shaun spent most of the hour asking people how they could be sure they’d want to stay with their partner if people grow and change over time.
I realized the problem isn’t change. It is whether you both change in the same direction.
Shaun
Fortunately, he concluded that I’d already come to the first time he asked that question: strong couples evolve together rather than drifting apart.
Sure, people often do grow in separate directions, and that’s always a risk — major change on one person’s part CAN destroy a marriage. But there’s no reason to assume going in that’s what’s going to happen.
And maybe I’m just overly romantic, but Andrews’ answer to Shaun’s question seemed bizarre.
We’ve all heard of couples who have been together for 50+ years, and one partner is devastated when the other dies. So assuming “everything breaks” and that if people could live for a thousand years, they would cease to be happy together flies in the face of that reality.
But the theme of the evening seemed to mostly be that the idea of two people wanting to be together for the long-haul was a stupid and limiting idea.
Morgan: Of course it’s a date. He only said it wasn’t to save face.
Claire: Or I assumed. Why did I assume? I’m not the kind of narcissistic personality who assumes every man wants to date me.
Morgan: Or we both assumed it was a date because it was a date. Nice talking with you. I’m so glad you’re my bestie. This is like a sleepover.
I was all for polyamory being shown in a good light. Society still looks down on people who choose to be in open relationships or to have more than one romantic partner, so it was refreshing to have it depicted as a normal variation.
But Enrique’s attitude toward monogamy reminded me of why I find many polyamorous people to be irritating. There’s this attitude as if everyone should be polyamorous, that it’s morally superior, and that anyone who believes in monogamy is an idiot who has bought into social pressure to choose a partner.
The truth is that some people are wired to be polyamorous, and some are wired for monogamy, and neither one is actually superior to the other. In a way, it’s like being gay or straight — people are born with a relationship orientation, and that’s just how it is.
As a demisexual, I liked Enrique’s valued emotional connection over physical attraction, but I could have done without the sneering about social conventions as a monogamist.
Also, while Morgan’s analysis of Claire’s fear of intimacy was spot on, it didn’t make sense that Claire wouldn’t want to be with Enrique if that’s what she fears. Since he resists defining their relationship as any one thing, that should take the pressure off, not make her fear that they might get too close.
Either way, Claire also annoyed me when she started getting into the business of telling people to get divorced.
I felt that she way overstepped her bounds and didn’t know what she was talking about.
That venture capitalist was clear about the fact that he uses work to escape from his wife’s pain, and his wife wasn’t blind to it.
Do you know what it’s like to wake up and not know if your wife is gonna wake up next to you? All these treatments have a little tag attached to them saying she might die.
Man
He wasn’t as supportive as he needed to be, and she was too focused on his well-being instead of her own health, but that certainly didn’t mean divorce was the answer. Claire’s unsolicited advice came from her own belief that relationships don’t last, not from anything having to do with them.
And I call BS on her claiming that this opinion was part of looking after Hannah’s health. It was her imposing her negativity on this couple, nothing more.
Thankfully, nobody listened to her advice, and instead, the husband gave up his workaholism and, in fact, his job altogether to be with his ailing wife.
That was the right decision, but I’m sure it shocked Claire since she expected the marriage to end in divorce.
Finally, what the heck was that nonsense with Jordan and her side business?
Olivia: Don’t you think we have enough to do being surgeons? Do you really want to get distracted by something trivial?
Jordan: Because wanting to make money taints the purity of medicine?
Are they going for some story about how residents don’t make enough, or about racial disparity in income levels and pay? Because this seemed like a pointless aside.
I’d rather that time be used for Jordan and Olivia to engage in actual medical practice.
The two are natural rivals, especially when you throw in Olivia’s relationship with Andrews too.
And we got a little taste of that, with Olivia struggling to give Hannah her prognosis and then Jordan jumping in to comfort the patient and reassure her that her disease wasn’t going to destroy her.
But there was no real reaction from Olivia, other than her deciding to support Jordan’s shoe insert business in the end.
The other big-time waster was Shaun and Lea. Maybe it’s because I don’t ship this couple, but I couldn’t care less whether they had sex in the shower or not, and way too much airtime was devoted to that.
Your turn, The Good Doctor fans.
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let me know if you think I’m too hard on The Good Doctor or whether you also found this episode bizarre and not up to par.
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The Good Doctor airs on ABC on Mondays at 10 PM EST/PST.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.