#guarded and snarky yet compassionate asshole who starts as an antagonist and ends up in the main group

[johannas-motivational-insults]

Morgan’s arc in 4x03 was really hard for me to watch. Not because she was being a jerk (though she obviously was), but because I’ve been there and it’s painful.

Morgan is grieving. She’s mourning the loss of a lifelong dream, something she has devoted years of her life to, and she’s currently in the bargaining phase. She’s putting up a fight to find any way to hold onto some scraps of that dream, to stay involved in the surgical department and have that level of impact on her patient’s care. Beyond that, her medical condition has alienated her from her peer group and support system in this time of personal crisis. She desperately needs to feel relevant and still feel like part of the group, even though (and precisely because) she’s not.

This is a story about someone coping with what is essentially an acquired disability. It may not affect her activities of daily living (yet) but it affected her ability to work, and this was particularly damaging to her because her work was her only source of validation. As I’ve said before, Morgan’s deepest need is to matter. And she gets that validation through her work, by helping people and saving lives. She may have been cast as a villain of sorts, but she’s got a hero complex. Now, working in internal medicine, she just doesn’t have that level of impact anymore. And now she can’t help feeling like a failure, like maybe her mom was right and this wasn’t a worthwhile thing to do with her life, like maybe she really is the underachiever after all despite all her hard work.

I’m going to be honest, I damn near cried in that final scene with Claire, when Morgan told her patient to thank his surgeon because she’d done all the important stuff. She wasn’t just humbled, her pain was palpable. I’ve been through a similar situation where I was extremely invested in something (both in terms of work put in and thirst for validation) and I too was forced to change roles after fighting it as long as I could, also because of a medical condition/acquired disability. And being in that different role was just so painful, because I couldn’t have the impact I wanted and no matter how much I wanted to I just didn’t feel like part of the group anymore.

I ended up leaving that situation behind because it was too painful and it was better for my mental health to invest my energies elsewhere, but Morgan is going to stay. She has to, she’s invested too much time and money into medicine and it’s really all she has. And that means we’re going to have another interesting grief storyline playing out over the course of a season. Morgan’s having an identity crisis before our eyes, folks.

With all this in mind, let’s give Morgan a bit of a break. If you need precedent for that, Claire got to be super messy while mourning her mother last year. She was, quite frankly, a jerk (which I actually loved, it was refreshing given how much emotional labor she was always being forced to do because she’s so nice all the time). In fact, that mean streak continued into her mourning Neil during the covid episodes, when she accused Morgan of being happy about elective surgeries being cancelled because now no one’s a surgeon anymore, not just her. Which, for the reasons I outlined above, was a really horrible thing to say. Morgan shrugged it off because she can take it as well as she gives it (and lbr, she has more respect for people who aren’t afraid of her, Carly proved that last season), but you could still see it stung.

That’s not to say Claire is the worse person or anything, obviously she’s a kinder and generally more considerate person than Morgan. Morgan’s a bitch, that’s her calling card and she’s proud of it. We’ve seen her show compassion and concern and go out of her way to help people lots of times (that’s why she’s in this mess, if you recall), but she doesn’t do it in a ‘nice’ way. My point is, Claire was allowed the space to be messy when she was grieving, and we should allow Morgan that space too. Not being ‘nice’ shouldn’t disqualify a person from getting to grieve in the way they need to, especially a woman (because tbh men are allowed to be hurt and angry however they want). Like obviously hold her responsible if she hurts people along the way, but let her be angry and hopeless and desperate in whatever way it comes out. She needs it.

This hurts to watch and will continue to hurt. But it is so cathartic and I’m soaking up every second of it. I haven’t seen such a compelling story about grief over an acquired disability since Raven’s arc in the early seasons of The 100.

Morgan, I know a lot of people aren’t on your side, but I am. I see you, I get you. Keep your chin up, girl, it will get better.