#anyway. suicide is never the answer but you could always broach the question

[melonisopod]

"If men were as bad as feminists say they wouldn't allow feminists to exist," is a real sentence I had to read with my own two eyes and ladies i don't think we're making it out of patriarchy alive.

[sextonsharpwinhalstead]

Chicago Med Review 5x01 “Never Going Back To Normal”

So, I guess I’m back on my bullsh*t. I can’t help it. These last two episodes are worthy of a review.

So, after a summer hiatus we got the answers to our burning questions: did Ava have something to do with Cornelius’s death?

What is the fate of Natalie and Will after that car crash on the roof?

Does Maggie have cancer?

and

Is April pregnant?

Let’s start from the bottom up.

April and Ethan slowly made their way back to each other during season 4. After she declared that she was with the shits, they smashed on the couch, and 24 hrs later she was “late.” I think we all knew it would be negative, but I do think it’s odd that they wrote her saying “I’m never late.” I’m not sure if this was just chatter or a false negative but since the subject was broached it had Ethan wondering “what if?” I think it’s fair to say that not only are these two back together but are also getting serious. They walked away with THE most uplifting story for themselves and the child they were treating. Anyway up to this point I’d always pegged April as the type who’d want to have kids and marriage considering the importance of family and how soft she is with everyone but I’m not so sure anymore. Her hesitation and remark about wanting kids much farther in the future reminded me that it took April weeks if not months to say yes to Tate’s proposal, and her shock at being pregnant lasted a lot longer than comfortable. I think April holds these things dear, but not necessarily for herself. We’ll see.

Onto Maggie’s story. Another easy guess. I think we all knew she had cancer, the question was what kind and how bad? Sadly, so many of us have been touched by cancer; it’s affected our friends, loved ones, co-workers, and there are probably some survivors in this fandom. So when I heard metastatic immediately I was like; damn. I, for one, am all for keeping your business your own, but Maggie’s decision is borderline delusional. I know we all know it’s about to get a LOT worse.

The Manstead car wreck. Okay, I have been in several car wrecks; shitty luck, bad tires, dangerous weather, I’ve had it happen; trees, fences, the HIGHWAY, I’ve been in it. So this wreck was a bit...much. My sister FLEW through the windshield of a vehicle and not only lived but had no issues with memory, and her cut wasn’t gushing like a Squeeze-It. I hated this story from the moment it began. It had massive plot holes and has been melodramatic AF. But I think what I hate the most is the inability to let the story be about Will. It continues to center Natalie when she’s just been adjacent. This show has a super weird way of writing life-changing events which happen to male characters but then somehow manages to leave the women holding the bag. Like damn, how’d we get here?

Ethan’s family drama left April caring for a newborn and his sister.

Daniel’s shooting left Sarah with major PTSD.

Will’s traumatic involvement with the mafia left Natalie in a mini-coma.

I’m not saying the men never have consequences but the lasting effects are transferred to the women closest to them.

Anyway, Will carries Natalie like Captain-Save-a-hoe to the ED and even tries to work on her before the night-shift Dr. Marcel hello daddy has to push him aside. I almost died when he said “You’re her boyfriend or whatever” it’s like Dominic Rains knows our pain. Anyway, med student Elsa tries to help Will but is barked at several times. I was happy to see her again but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see the 180 in her personality. Elsa can seem mouesy but let’s be real; that is a boss bitch, who all last season was on top of her shit and not giving a good gotdamn about anybody’s emotional state; only the job at hand. She knew what she wanted and was balancing dual majors and nailing it too. But something shifted and now she’s giving a damn about Will and being one of the only three people in this entire show that recognizes his trauma. I was quietly whispering...please god no, too. Please Med don’t ruin this character and make her lose her gotdamn mind over some dick.

Sleeping Beauty finally awakes but has some short-term memory problems. Something her skeevy boyfriend Phillip is ready to exploit when he shimmies a ring on her finger. Okay, I’m going to need you give me your nuanced ears and eyes when I begin this next part because I don’t want it to sound too victim-blamey...but...Natalie brought this situation on herself. I don’t think it was wrong of her to try and be supportive of Phillip but how the hell didn’t the warning flags go flying when he began being intimate with her so soon after his wife died? The alarms should be blaring now with a ring on her finger considering she hasn’t forgotten the long timeline...it’s just. I don’t care. It makes her look trife AF. But mostly it makes her look naive.

I do think the knowledge Dr. Marcel has about the ring only being on her finger AFTER her initial examination is a little bomb they’ll wait to drop later in the season. I just hope it’s Natalie who finds out and not Will. Natalie needs to save herself.

Finally, let’s talk about that story!

The direction this story took was one I played around with in a fic. The idea of Ava being an obsessive, manipulative, dangerous psycho has always seem fitting to me. I know a lot of people are upset and horrified but I think it made perfect sense. My only critique was the empty feeling of not getting a background check on her. Did Latham call her next of kin? Who were they? Who was she? The mystery of Ava will always be the most bitter pill for me swallow. 

Med was manipulating the viewers and the subjects of the story so we were all left with a sense of confusion. None of it made sense if you only view Ava through one lens, if you could see her through both it was executed in a way that Med has never had the audacity to try and do, and I got to give it to them cause damn it was good. They really had us questioning everything up to her final moments. Was Connor losing it like his mother or was Ava as scheming as he thought? I think that her death was a good reason to leave Med. 

He left Chicago as quickly as he could as kid to get away from his mother’s tragic suicide only to return and have another tragic suicide be the reason for his departure. And damn, it was abrupt. Like maybe one more episode where Connor finishes his last surgery cause anyone scheduled with him got left hanging! He said goodbye to the two people who gave him a job and that was the last we ever saw of him. I’m not nearly as broken up about this as a big chunk of the fandom seems to be. I really feel like Connor’s story was told. Being the most developed one; can be suicide for a character, especially in a show that has Entmoot syndrome when it comes to personal information about  its characters.

Personally I’m hoping the show becomes like the rest of One Chicago, who had other polarizing characters leave. It allowed the quality to spread and viewers finally got more from the others.

Either way, after this episode, nothing is going to be “normal” again.