[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Chicago Med Season 11 premiere “We All Fall Down.”]
Chicago Med left fans with a major question at the end of last spring’s finale — who’s the father of Dr. Hannah Asher’s (Jessy Schram) baby, her ex-boyfriend Dr. Mitch Ripley (Luke Mitchell) or friend Dr. Dean Archer (Steven Weber) — and it doesn’t waste any time in revealing the answer in the Wednesday, October 1, Season 11 premiere.
“We All Fall Down” also sees the ED coping without Maggie (Marlyne Barrett stepped away for personal reasons), and Doris (Lorena Diaz) really steps up, Dr. Caitlin Lenox (Sarah Ramos) coping (or not) with her prion disease diagnosis, and Ripley takes a step forward in his new relationship with Sadie (Holly Curran).
Read on for all the major moments as well as insight from Weber and showrunner Allen MacDonald.
Is the father of Asher’s baby Archer or Ripley?
The premiere reveals immediately that Archer is the father of Asher’s baby. They slept together when she went to his place in “The Book of Archer,” after an episode of “tough, emotional conversations about who he is and who he wants to be and what he’s going to do in his future. She’s the only one that will talk to him straight [and] Archer will let talk to him straight [that] way,” MacDonald tells TV Insider. “They had this real emotional connection.”
He continues, “In the morning, I think they had a conversation, are we going to turn this into something else, or are we better as friends? And I think the agreement they came to was that they were better off as friends. And I think that’s what you see for the rest of the season. Although if you go back and you watch, you can see that Jessy Schram and Steven Weber knew that the characters had slept together, and they were playing that. It’s like The Sixth Sense: Once Bruce Willis is dead and you go back, you see all the hints. They’re obvious, but you didn’t notice them the first time around.”
As for why Archer’s the father and not Ripley, “I just found that there was the most fertile, dramatic ground with these two friends because even though there’s an age difference between them, it doesn’t really mean anything to them because they’re both old souls that have been through a lot and they connect on that level, that’s the basis and foundation of their friendship,” explains MacDonald. “I just didn’t think even though she had been in a relationship with Ripley for over a season, they connected, but I always felt the emotional connection between Archer and Hannah went much deeper.”
Elizabeth Sisson/NBC
Archer has some concerns about Asher not telling people he’s the father, thinking it’s because of his age, but she shares it’s about her own worries: losing her status and respect at work, her sister hating her for having the baby she can’t, and, yes, how they’ll raise a kid together. Plus, telling people makes it real. He tells her to forget about telling anyone else the truth. But how does he really feel?
According to MacDonald, Archer means what he says. “I think he has a side of him that’s tremendously insecure and he’s 65, he’s having a baby with a 39-year-old woman, and he’s afraid that she’s ashamed of it, that she’s kind of embarrassed that she’s having a baby with someone that’s 26 years older than her, although that shouldn’t be the case because they’re both adults and they had a connection,” the showrunner says. “Steven Weber says this a lot: They’re old souls and they connect on a different level because Hannah’s been through a lot, and so has he. But I think after Hannah confesses what’s going on in her head, I think he really does feel better, and he knows it’s not about him.”
Will Asher and Archer get together?
Asher and Archer plan to raise the kid just as friends, but there’s something about their hug and the looks on their faces that has us wondering if they’re on the same page.
“I think Dean genuinely loves her,” Weber tells TV Insider. “It’s a mature love. It’s a knowing love, which is to say he’s not going to try to woo her or win her or do any of that idiotic, sentimental crap, but he really feels safe with this woman. Having a child is the deepest expression of that. I think he worries that she might not be able to handle that kind of love coming from a guy like him. They’ve got this great relationship now that’s finally aligned, only to have it upended by this extreme gesture. So, I think he’s nervous as hell.”
MacDonald points out that they’ve come a long way from when Archer first arrived at Med; they would be a true enemies-to-lovers romance should they get together. “The thing I saw going back and watching the older episodes is that they have a beautiful friendship, but there’s some sparks there. And I don’t think those characters are really willing to acknowledge that or admit it to themselves that that’s there,” he says, pointing to their connection of shared pain and trauma. “I think that’s ageless. I think the age difference melts away when they have that connection.”
He also admits that if nothing had changed, they would’ve just remained friends. “But she gets pregnant, and what’s more intimate than having a child with someone? So, when you ask about where we’re going in the future, yeah, they’re going to try to co-parent, but there’s a lot of feelings bubbling under the surface there, I think, on both sides. And I think those things are going to come up and cause some tension and cause some conflict. And I think at different points of the season, some of those older feelings will pop back up. The question I have is, will they ever pop up at the same time? Will they ever be on the same page at the same time?” MacDonald teases.
Is the door closed on Asher and Ripley?
It sounds like it! Things do get awkward in the premiere when Ripley thinks he’s the father, only for Asher to have to explain he’s not. She is quick to reassure him she didn’t cheat on him with Archer.
“Ripley and Hannah were obviously attracted to each other, but I don’t think that relationship ever quite worked. I think they wanted it to work more than it did, and I think Ripley had to do a lot of growing last season. I think one of the costs of all that growth is losing Hannah,” shares MacDonald, praising Schram and Mitchell’s work in their elevator scene in the premiere. “And I think that’s something he regrets. But I think Hannah has really moved on.”
How was Maggie written out?
Going into the season, we knew that Marlyne Barrett wouldn’t be returning for personal reasons. The premiere is vague about where Maggie is; Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson) comments she hasn’t spoken to her since she left, and Doris remarks that she’s keeping her spot warm until she gets back.
“We were all sad to hear that Marlyne Barrett wanted to step away for a while, to focus on her personal life. We hope at some point that Maggie returns and we are kind of saving story for when that does happen,” MacDonald says.
He stresses, “We are definitely intending to see Maggie again. I don’t know if it will be this season. It could possibly still be this season, but if not this season, hopefully next season. I think that the audience, like the writers and the other cast members will miss Maggie from the show. She’s an OG character, and this was all sudden. And so I would just say that we are a little bit vague about it in the beginning, in the premiere, but we will give more information about it as the season progresses.”
Weber adds that everyone pitches in in Maggie’s absence and the writers give supporting characters, like Doris, “more depth, more life in the stories. I think people are going to love this because these people who are so familiar, to our decade long audience, finally, we’ve scratched the surface of these characters and they have a lot to show. So look, I think with Maggie’s at least temporary absence, they just make it up while at the same time seeing how important she is into this world.”
Is Ripley moving too fast in his new relationship with Sadie?
Ripley realizes, through thinking he’s going to be a father to Asher’s baby, that he wants that, their relationship aside. “Now, he’s kind of sad, and that’s kind of why he jumps more so into his relationship with Sadie at the end,” MacDonald admits.
Ripley and Sadie have been seeing each other after she showed up at his place in last season’s finale. And when he arrives at her place near the end of the premiere, she wants to reschedule since her babysitter canceled. Instead, he suggests that they just order in and include her daughter in their plans, and while Sadie’s a bit reluctant since she hasn’t told her about them and she’s worried about Emelia getting too attached to him too soon, he reminds her that Emelia knows him. Whatever’s between them is still new, Sadie argues, but he promises her he’s in. But it does feel like he might be jumping into that relationship because Sadie has a daughter in such a way that could be detrimental to it.
“I think he realizes he wants to have a family, and he just wants it to happen as quickly as possible, I think, as we all do. I think he justifies it in his head, ‘Well, we’ve been together a couple months and I’m serious about this. So, what are we waiting for?’ What I don’t think he knows he’s doing is pushing a relationship faster than it should probably go. And I think the correct term there is intimacy rushing,” MacDonald says.
Elizabeth Sisson/NBC
How’s Lenox handling her prion disease diagnosis?
She could be doing better. Dr. Sam Abrams (Brennan Brown) confronts her about not making a follow-up appointment, then tries to get her to call a psychiatrist to talk through what she’s dealing with. Yes, she could be symptom-free for another 20 years, or she could be dead in a year like her mother. The episode ends with her crumpling up the psychiatrist’s card and hooking up with a man in the back of a bar. She is starting to snap out of her denial and anger, says MacDonald.
“I think that the thing that Lenox is wrestling with in the premiere is hope and whether to believe in it. Because I don’t think Lenox likes to be a sucker, anybody’s sucker, even fate’s. And she’d rather just confront the truth, which is she has a death sentence, and she might as well get on with it until that happens. But she has a unique diagnosis in that she could start showing signs tomorrow and be gone in 18 months, or she could die when she’s 45, which is when her mother died, or she could be one of the lucky ones and get into her 50s. But she doesn’t know. That shoe can drop at any time over the next 15 or 20 years. And so does she stop living or does she try to live more?” he asks.
Up until the premiere, she hasn’t been dealing with it emotionally. But over the course of the episode, “she allows herself a little bit more hope than she did before, especially because she brings that girl back to life on the table. There might be some room for hope in Lennox’s life moving forward. I think the best way to verbalize what happens in the last few scenes there is that she is going to chart her own course to deal with what she’s going through.”
What did you think of the premiere and Archer being the father of Asher’s baby? Let us know in the comments section below.
Chicago Med, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC