Get to your TV, stat! A hostage situation creates chaos at Westside Hospital in Minneapolis when Doc, the engrossing medical drama about amnesiac Dr. Amy Larsen (a sensitive Molly Parker), who lost nearly a decade of memories (but not her physician’s smarts!) in an auto accident, returns for a second season.
Life-or-death moments define the upcoming 22 episodes of this propulsive series, inspired by an Italian drama based on the true story of Dr. Pierdante Piccioni, who lost a dozen years of his past in a car crash. The first installment’s finale saw Amy vindicated after being framed for a deadly medical error by her boss, Dr. Richard Miller (Scott Wolf), who was fired. Her love life wasn’t so tidy. She was still torn between two handsome MDs: younger Jake (Jon-Michael Ecker) and her married ex Michael (Omar Metwally), whom she can’t remember divorcing.
“Relationships need to transform,” Parker told us about what to expect in the second season. “With Michael, the attachment is so deep, in the way that one is attached to someone who has been your family and your person. The relationship with Jake is fascinating. This year, we’re getting to meet his daughter, his father, and so we’re getting to understand him. He’s not just this lovesick hot doctor.”
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The love triangle takes a backseat in the opener’s tense standoff, which sparks a memory in Amy that helps avert the crisis and kicks off a season-long quest. “It makes Amy realize she has to recover as many memories as she can,” Parker told us on set in Toronto. After all, what other lifesaving nuggets might be hidden in her brain? But in the good doc’s well-intentioned mission to retrieve her lost years, she stretches herself dangerously thin between taking on tough medical cases and undergoing intense treatments with the help of her neuropsychiatrist bestie Gina Walker (Amirah Vann).
“She’s on the one hand solving mystery medical cases during the day at work, but also a detective in her own life trying to figure out what her unconscious is trying to tell her,” Parker says.
The images Amy recalls, like a mysterious snow globe, are puzzling, but all seem to be building toward a crucial memory. “She gets little flashes,” Parker told us. Among the treatments is TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), which uses magnetic fields to excite nerve cells in the brain. One method Parker didn’t love shooting was the sensory-deprivation tank, where you float in body temperature water in total darkness. She told us, “I, Molly, am a bit claustrophobic. You’re swimming in this teeny clamshell with 40 crew members standing around.”
Gina is “very protective of the choices that her best friend makes and wants to help her be a whole human,” Vann says. Season one established Gina as Molly’s support system, and in the upcoming episodes, “we get to find out — is Gina that strong to carry all those burdens? Then somebody new comes in to tip the balance. I don’t think Gina likes her that much.”
That somebody would be the fierce new chief of internal medicine, Joan Ridley (Felicity Huffman), Amy’s former professor and mentor, who replaces the fired Dr. Miller. She’d rather Amy abandon her mission to plumb the depths of her already very deep mind and focus on work.
John Medland / Fox
“Joan took this job to make this hospital the best hospital in the state, maybe the world. Amy is to Joan, David Beckham, and she wants Amy to get back to where she was,” says Huffman, who prepared for the role by reading doctors’ autobiographies. Joan approves of pre-accident Amy’s emotionally distanced style, a coping method for the loss of her young son, but post-coma Amy is bent on becoming a more empathetic practitioner.
In the scene we observed on set between Parker, Vann, and Huffman coming up in episode seven, the formidable women debate how far to push the law to help a domestic violence victim.
“Joan, the way [showrunners] Barbie [Kligman] and Hank [Steinberg] have written her is a rebel. I think she was in Doctors Without Borders. She was probably in Somalia when Black Hawk Down happened. She probably slept with one of the Rolling Stones,” Huffman says.
Joan is also hiding her own health problem, a nerve condition that could lead to cancer. “Her ambition for the hospital takes precedence over her health. She doesn’t need people’s sympathy; she needs people’s excellence,” Huffman says.
Parker reveals another intriguing twist, “Amy starts to have the odd [memory] flash that Joan is in, and she doesn’t know what that’s about.”
Things get even more deliciously complicated with the arrival of a new intern, driven and eager-to-impress Hannah (Emma Pfitzer Price.) Like Amy, she’s coping with loss and the adversity it brings. Hannah’s family disintegrated after her father died, and she put herself through medical school. But after discovering that a hospital colleague holds the key to a painful family secret, Hannah begins to play dangerous games with her unsuspecting coworkers.
“Some flashes come up that are really a mystery that Amy doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be telling her, but they seem to happen when Hannah’s around,” Parker says. “[This season] we get to take the show in this new direction. The show still operates in the same kind of weekly mystery — we’re in the hospital solving cases and having our relationships, but at the same time, Amy’s a bit of a detective.” Diagnosis: must watch.
Doc, Season 2 Premiere, Tuesday, September 23, 9/8c, Fox
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