Choi returned to the hospital, but he wasn’t the only one with something to prove.
On Chicago Med Season 7 Episode 7, he had trouble passing a test involving a fake patient and a chest tube, but when Will needed him in a pinch, he got that tube in.
Meanwhile, the drugs she was taking might have augmented Vanessa’s anxiety, but either way, she was lucky that all the tests she was running turned out to have a purpose.
Choi’s return was one of the most highly anticipated of the season, but I had to laugh at Maggie’s reaction.
Maggie: Why is everyone standing around?
Choi: Hey Mags. Long time, no see.
She tried to get another doctor in the room with Vanessa, only to find everyone standing around like they had nothing to do. That was hardly professional or appropriate!
And when Choi almost immediately went off for tests with Archer, alarm bells began ringing in my head.
Archer has been taking over for Choi as head of the ED, much to the entire staff’s chagrin.
Choi is a far more popular ED head, even if he and Will have butted heads, and April used to get annoyed with his tendency to put his nose into patients’ personal lives.
And Archer doesn’t have much of a moral code. Surprisingly, he apologized to Choi for his potential role in the shooting!
But seriously, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for Archer to grade Choi harshly so that Archer can hold onto his position of power for a while longer.
Choi did fine when he had to intubate a patient for real, even if he was almost as nervous as JD on Scrubs Season 1 Episode 1.
He’s more than proven himself now, and I’m wondering how much longer he’ll accept being sidelined before he begins demanding his old job back.
Archer isn’t going to give up the ED head position without a fight — will these two old friends end up at each other’s throats?
Meanwhile, the Cooper/Will stuff took a tragic turn.
Cooper’s second-guessing himself and guilt over Eleanor’s death added an extra dimension to his character and made it less clear whether he’s involved in anything shady.
Cooper: Sober doctors are harder to manipulate. Companies like VAS-COM want to make sure you don’t get a sudden case of medical ethics.
Will: Do you feel you’ve been morally compromised?
Cooper: How else do you get the crab legs?
He might have taken that cocaine partially out of guilt and partially out of fear that Will was onto him — after all, Will was asking a ton of uncomfortable questions.
He’s going to be all right, physically, which means Goodwin will have a ton of OTHER questions for him that he might not want to answer.
But if I were her, I wouldn’t have discussed it with Will in front of Cooper. Yes, he’s unconscious, but coma patients can sometimes hear what’s happening around them, especially on medical dramas.
Maybe it’s offbase, but I had this feeling that Will and Sharon’s conversation was going to come back to bite them.
At least Chicago Med is a bit more realistic than Days of Our Lives, so we won’t have to worry about the doctors not realizing that Cooper faked being in a coma. But still.
Also, since Med established that Cooper’s father-in-law is an influential board member who vetoed Sharon’s ban of the VAS-COM machine, I wonder what his response will be to this whole mess and whether he’ll blame Will or Sharon for his son-in-law’s condition.
Elsewhere, Marcel had the opportunity to prove himself to Blake, and he passed that test with flying colors.
The fascinating thing about their dynamic is that Blake seems to like it when Marcel stands up to her, while Marcel feels this need to apologize every time he does.
I don’t know where that came from. Marcel didn’t seem to be adverse to standing up to people in power before he crossed paths with Blake.
Either way, I’m glad he turned Avery down, at least for now. Marcel has enough problems without not only dating a patient but dating a patient whose mother is both overcontrolling and in a position of power at the hospital!
Stevie and Vanessa competed for the most annoying character of the hour.
While Stevie turned out to be correct, Scott and Abrams’ concerns weren’t misplaced. She was potentially giving false hope to a 15-year-old who was already tying his mental health to his father’s ability to recover.
I feel like the 15-year-old I was fighting for today was me. I was EJ’s age when I started taking care of my mom.
Stevie
Stevie needs to get help for the issues surrounding her relationship with her mother. They impact all of her decisions, both professionally and personally, and she’s never clearheaded.
Offering patients unauthorized tests to prove Abrams wrong was bad enough, but confessing to Terri that she’d had the van towed was stupid.
Stevie knows her mother is volatile. If she was going to make this confession, she should have done it in front of Charles or another psychiatrist so that a professional could mitigate Terri’s responses.
Stevie had to have known that her mother might turn violent if she found out about this. Did she really expect Terri to be understanding?
As for Vanessa, she based her insecurities about Dr. Charles’ opinion of her on absolutely nothing.
Those pills she’s taking to stay awake might be making her paranoid, but still.
Her constant insecurity and desire to prove herself are annoying, and her drug abuse was evident. She was talking a mile a minute and coming up with ideas for diagnoses that sounded more like someone in the throes of a manic episode than a doctor making a well-reasoned argument.
She needs to know about Cooper’s collapse ASAP. She might think his drug-related issues have nothing to do with her, but at least there’s a chance she’d get a wake-up call out of it.
From the trailer for Chicago Med Season 7 Episode 8, it looks like Vanessa might be the next one to collapse from drug use, though, so any warning she gets about it will likely come too late.
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Chicago Med airs on NBC on Wednesdays at 8 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.