What To Know
- The fall finale of Doc Season 2 centers on Hannah and her brother Charlie escalating in their determination to take down Amy for what they feel she did to their father.
- Executive producer Hank Steinberg breaks down Hannah’s dilemma when it comes to Amy and Charlie.
- Steinberg also explains the complicated romantic entanglements for Amy and Jake, Amy and Michael, and Michael and Nora, after some major developments.
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Doc Season 2 Episode 9 “Kaddish.”]
“If you thought today was fun, that was only the beginning.” So says a deepfake of Amy’s voice. And no, that day was not fun in the Doc fall finale, at least not for anyone except the person who created that voice.
The fall finale saw everyone come together to be there for Jake (Jon Ecker) during his dad’s funeral, and that included, of course, his ex-girlfriend Amy (Molly Parker), his boss (and Amy’s ex-husband) Michael (Omar Metwally), and the rest of the hospital staff. That meant Hannah (Emma Pfitzer Price), too, and she blames Amy for her father dying by suicide. She and her brother Charlie (Daniel Gravelle) have been scheming to make Amy suffer, but he takes it too far and sends a recording that blows up Michael and Nora’s (Sarah Allen) marriage: Amy talking about kissing Michael in the elevator and Gina being honest about what she’s seen in his new relationship. (Amy and Jake, however, are now back together.) Hannah was not happy with Charlie, who then created the aforementioned deepfake to end the episode.
Below, executive producer Hank Steinberg breaks down the fall finale and teases what’s ahead with the Amy and Hannah storyline, Amy and Jake’s romance, and more. (Plus, read what Jon Ecker had to say about the fall finale here.)
The fall finale ends with Charlie making that deepfake of Amy’s voice. First of all, there are cracks showing in Hannah and Charlie’s relationship right now because she thinks he’s going too far, especially with what he sent during the funeral, but she still wants Amy to suffer, right? So, where exactly is Hannah’s head when it comes to her own want and need and plan to hurt Amy?
Hank Steinberg: I think this is a half-baked plan that seemed like a good idea when it started, an idea that would bring some satisfaction, and Hannah was willing to do some things to discredit Amy and hurt her at work, and revenge can be intoxicating, but it might be starting to spiral out of control with her brother, who’s much less with it than her. They’re both damaged people from the tragedy with their father’s suicide and whatever’s happened in their family. We’re going to watch, and there’s a push and pull between how far and whenever there’s partners in crime, it’s always fun in stories that one of them is a little bit more pushing things in another. We see that in many caper movies and shows, that there are different personalities and they have different levels that they want to go to. She’s also got a lot more at stake. She’s worked hard to become a doctor, and he’s kind of a drifter ne’er-do-well who’s not doing anything with his life, so it’s kind of easier for him.
John Medland/Fox
Also she’s seeing Amy every day. That’s the other thing, too, right?
She’s seeing Amy every day. She’s the one risking, he’s just sitting in his apartment. She’s had some moments of liking Amy. Right now, that’s not where she is, but it’ll start to shift a little bit and it’s going to get harder and harder for her to go after Amy when she starts to see the good sides of Amy become more present to her in coming episodes.
Could Hannah ever turn on her brother or does she feel like she’s in too deep?
He’s her blood, right? So she’s going to be — depends what happens. There’s going to be some pretty strong consequences from their actions coming up, and that’s going to be the fun of watching it, is to see where her limit is or if she gets in too deep or whatnot.
What can you tease about what’s going to be happening with that deepfake of Amy’s voice?
Well, you can imagine that if he can mimic her voice and to the point that it’s completely believable, he can get her in all kinds of trouble — on the personal front, on the professional front. There’s lots that he can do.
It seems like Sonya (Anya Banerjee) and TJ (Patrick Walker) might be noticing something about Hannah because of all of her questions about the triangle. Are they the ones who will maybe start wondering about her now that everyone knows about this hack? Or will it be someone else who first gets clued in?
I don’t want to tease too much, but we’re inclined to let Amy be the one in control of her own destiny. But TJ and Sonya are aligning for other reasons, and there’s a flirtation happening there that could evolve into something more.
As we see at the end of this fall finale, Amy and Jake are getting back together. But should Jake be making a decision like that when he’s still grieving?
That’s the point. The reason that we came up with this story was multidimensional. We wanted to deepen Jake’s character, get to know him better, but also create a situation where people who are in grief, there could be a distillation and understanding of what’s important, what their priorities are, what they need when they’re raw. And they can either make a desperate choice from a place of vulnerability that’s wrong, or maybe it can bring out kind of clarifying what’s important and that tomorrow’s not promised to anyone, so I might as well grab today what’s in front of me and what I want.
John Medland/Fox
We’ve seen them try to make a relationship work more than once. What makes them equipped to work this time and why do they think it can?
It’s interesting. They’ve had a couple of phases. Before the accident, it was working very well. The day of the accident, they told each other they loved each other for the first time, which is sort of beautifully poignant and ironic. And then she didn’t remember him and then they rediscovered — well, he always loved her, but she rediscovered that there’s basically a very natural chemistry between them. But it was clouded and messed up by her entanglements with Michael and her confusion just about who she was. And now some time has passed, she’s actually gotten to know Jake better, seen him more, and understands that what they have is real. She’s seen that her stuff with Michael is all cluttered and kind of just messed up at this point. And so something has clarified for her.
We intentionally had Michael’s relationship blowing up and having him come to her first and be there and say, “I could be here for you again. My life is a mess.” And she’s actively saying, “Go back to your wife, fix your life.” In a very real way, I think she’s slightly tempted because he’s right there and he’s always been her person, but she’s like, “I have feelings for Jake now. I’m actually trying to move forward. Michael’s not the kind of man who’s going to walk out on his new baby. This is just going to be ugly if I open the door here,” and sends him the other way. Those are the fun layers.
What is next for Amy and Jake? Both as a couple personally, but also as a couple whose relationship would be under the microscope at work and also especially with Joan (Felicity Huffman) keeping an eye on things.
They’re going to have to stay sneaky and keep it a secret, which is fun. Makes it sexy, too, for them to just kind of be slinking around. Joan, of course, has the secrets of her own. So, everybody sort of has something on everyone else at a certain point, which will be fun in the back half of the season.
Speaking of the Michael of it, because he kept looking at Amy during the funeral and then he goes to see her, he says he’s lost. Where is his heart when it comes to Amy and Nora? It’s all so complicated.
We know he never really fell out of love with Amy. They had this tragedy, they couldn’t get through it. She pushed him away and she pushed him away so strongly he sort of had to move forward, and that’s life. So I think he either loves Nora or has convinced himself to love Nora or convinced himself that he has to move forward, and the heart usually wins out on the head. So I kind of think that’s where he is, and he’s an upstanding, good guy who wants to rebuild his life, and here’s a good woman who loves him and is there for him, and now we have a child. But listen, when Amy wakes up from her accident and is like, “I love you, what’s happening?” I mean, he’s just completely upside down. So he’s never stopped being upside down from that moment.
But then he does get home to that letter from Nora. She left, she’s done with this. Is that just a gut reaction — which is an understandable one given what she heard and everything else between Michael and Amy — from Nora, or is this something she’d been thinking about for a while and this kind of was just like the last straw? What can you say about that decision from her?
Well, she’s already forgiven him for kissing her in the elevator last year and she’s tried to move past that, so this, of course, sits on top of that. I think it sits on top of this nagging feeling that she has, that when Amy woke up and she remembered loving him, that she was competing with a ghost. The audience will have to find out if she’s going to stick to her guns there or that’s just an impulsive reaction to maybe to dare him to fight for her. We don’t know.
There’s Joan’s health. We see her on the phone with her doctor and she says she was feeling fatigued, but her hand is steady, asks about still operating. What’s coming up there?
Listen, you pull a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the second act, right? So, yeah, at some point, people are going to start to suspect something’s wrong with her. She’s going to have to try to cover it up and then we’ll have fun playing that out and seeing how that goes.
There are Amy’s memory flashes. We’ve seen how detrimental they can be to her health. We’ve seen her agree to pull back, to take the medication, but she’s having these flashes, she sees when she went out with Jake and his dad. So how torn is she going to continue to be when it comes to every moment she has a little flash, especially if it’s one of Danny, to not fall back on what she was doing before?
She’s kind of twisted up. The thing is Hannah and Charlie have been messing with her, so she hasn’t really been making the mistakes that people think she made. So we will have to see if she’s going to want to go back and go get her memory treatments because they’re not really causing the problems that people think. She definitely still wants to get her memories back. They’re very useful for her. They fill in details of her life that she’s missing. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re cause pain. But in any case, it’s information that she feels like she needs. And that’s really been a fun part of this season, is having her brain be this additional story generator and obstacle and a way to kind of unfold what happened in the past.
What’s coming up with Gina (Amirah Vann)? Are we going to see in therapy? That Gina-centric episode was so good.
Yeah, that was one of our really strong ones, and Amirah is an incredible actress. We’re spoiled. We have such a great cast and so many great actors and characters and only 43 minutes to tell these stories. So we’re always like, “Ah, OK, how do we make sure everybody shares the wealth and make sure everybody’s got good stuff going on?” And it’s a nice thing about having 22 episodes is there is enough room to give Sonya real story and Gina real story and TJ and then still always have Amy as the central through line, but be able to balance those things and have them weigh in. So there’ll be undulations for everybody.
Are we going to see Gina’s sister again?
She was great and they’re great together and they really felt like sisters. So, yeah, if the story lent itself to that organically, of course. We’re introducing everyone’s families to dimensionalize them this year.
What else can you tease about what’s coming up when the show returns?
Big, big crescendo happening with the Charlie and Hannah storyline. And the Joan illness, when that starts to come out and get exposed, it’s going to be very fun.
Doc, Midseason Return, Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 9/8c, Fox