Spoilers ahead for the January 12 episode of Chicago Med, called “The Things We Thought We Left Behind,” and the promo for the next episode.
Chicago Med brought the drama to the surgical suite this week with the arrival of famous football player Wes Tucker in need of a new liver, but with the not-so-small issue that Tucker’s status as an alcoholic ruled him out from the transplant list. After a fan with anxiety decided to donate a lobe of his liver, Pamela and Crockett moved ahead with the transplant. They ran into another snag when they discovered they’d have to wait for the donor’s meds to work their way out of his system in four hours, and the promo for the next episode indicates that things will go from inconvenient to bad to worse. But maybe not as bad as it seems!
First things first, though: the promo for the next episode reveals that something will go wrong in the surgical suite that has nothing to do with medical complications, and it will result in at least one Chicago Fire character crossing over. Take a look:
I’ll be the first to admit that things look pretty bad for the surgical team at Med in this promo, with first the anesthesiologist dropping, and then Pamela, along with everybody else. Crockett is fortunately outside of the room when everybody starts dropping, so he at least avoided whatever has happened to them. As if Goodwin didn’t already have enough problems in Season 7!
Capp – who is evidently dropping by Med from Fire – tells everybody that opening those doors would put everybody at risk, and CFD sending somebody from Squad isn’t exactly a good sign. The odds seem good that some kind of gas is responsible, although that would raise even more questions even beyond whether everybody will make it out of that surgical suite without any permanent damage.
Despite the promo focusing on the crisis up in surgery, however, fans don’t have to worry that the whole entire episode will center on whatever has gone wrong with Pamela and the rest collapsing. The next episode of Chicago Med is called “What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt You,” and the episode description courtesy of NBC reveals that there will be a lot going on elsewhere:
Will and Stevie get stuck in the middle of a marital face-off. Dr. Blake’s entire surgical team mysteriously collapses during a liver transplant. Charles encourages Ethan to reconcile with his father.
I doubt that Chicago Med would spend time on Will and Stevie dealing with marital issues or the return of Ethan for what could be a heart-to-heart with Dr. Charles if whatever is affecting the surgical suite is going to be catastrophic for everybody. The description is admittedly short on details, so it’s not 100% clear whether Will is helping Stevie with her pending divorce that she revealed at the end of “The Things We Thought We Left Behind,” or a problem that arises involving patients.
As for what’s on the way with Ethan, the showrunners previewed his return for a “very moving story” with Dr. Charles, and I can only assume that the encouragement to reconcile with his father wouldn’t happen if the hospital is overwhelmed by whatever is affecting the surgical suite.
None of this is to say that the surgical team will have an easy time in the next episode or recover fully by the end of the hour, but it seems obvious that the crisis won’t be so bad that every single second of the episode needs to be devoted to it. Find out with the next new episode of Chicago Med in the 2022 winter TV season on Wednesday, January 19 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, ahead of Chicago Fire at 9 p.m. ET.
