It’s safe to say that we will be talking about that Doc midseason finale until the series returns.
Fortunately for us, we won’t have to wait long for the show’s return — a blessed welcome compared to many other shows. But that doesn’t make it any easier to process everything that transpired after Doc Season 2 Episode 9.
We caught up with Doc’s showrunner and EP, Hank Steinberg, to unpack all the hour’s juicy bits and touch on what we can expect when the series returns! Here’s the first part of our chat, so return tomorrow for the rest!
I’m fascinated with Amy’s memory recovery process, and I love that she finally saw Danny. We also saw how far she’s willing to push herself to keep going and getting those memories. So, what can we anticipate from that moving forward?
Yeah, she’s determined to fill in the pieces of her life, and the more pieces she remembers, the more it reinforces the fact that this is information that I need. So that’s the fun part of the season, is her having access to slivers of information, and she can’t control it, but her brain seems to feed her things at times that…
Her brain’s trying to warn her, but it doesn’t warn her so perfectly. She always has to do some digging and investigating to sort out what it means, and, of course, the brain can fool her a bit. We’re going to continue with that judiciously to dole out pieces of her past through her memory.
It’s a really cool, fun aspect of the show this year that sets it apart from the first year…; it’s a physical obstacle for her. It’s something she has to pursue.
She has to do these treatments that have side effects, and it also can throw her in her life when she’s getting memories that put her emotionally and psychologically off balance. So for us, it’s super fun.
Yeah, and regarding Katie, because I’m also fascinated with that dynamic, they were getting really close. I loved the graveyard scene, but she’s retreated to Michael.
So how will you continue to explore that dynamic and dig into why Katie is so uncomfortable with Amy trying to remember Danny?
Yeah, there are a couple of questions about that.
Katie did not appreciate how mom had changed, and there’s somewhere in there a fear that the more mom remembers, the more… I don’t know if it’s rational, but “Will Mom just become more like old Mom the more she remembers, or will she actually be able to learn?”
And then obviously when her pursuit of the memories creates physical upsets for her, for Katie, it’s provocative because it’s, I’m here right now, right here. Why do you have to look backwards?
And obviously, there’s some jealousy and resentment that Danny was more important than her. Certainly, in his death, it became the thing that consumed Amy to the point that she could barely see much else, except for work as a distraction. But there’s also the thing of Danny was always a kid with a heart issue.
So, in families, if one child has an illness, they tend to get more attention. Even before he would have died, Katie probably had feelings that he was the favorite, or at least got the gravity of the attention. So that’s always been a complicated dynamic for her.
Now, whether or not there’s something specifically that Katie does not want her to remember, who knows? Could be.
Okay. The finale, of course, the drama, just so much drama! Michael finally just comes out with it about his feelings for Amy still. Nora’s gone with the baby.
For two seasons now, we’ve seen Michael hanging on to both his marriage and his job by a thread, and it’s snapping. Where will we find Michael in the second half of the season after all of this?
I mean, Michael’s life is a mess. Everything was going pretty smoothly for him, and then Amy got into that car accident and hit her head, and it’s been a lot of trouble for him ever since.
He’s such a grounded and together character, so to watch him start to unravel is interesting and fun. We’re beating him up, but that’s always good for the character to take those blows and see how they react.
He’s going to have his hands full with picking up a lot of pieces in the back half of the season — Nora’s left. We’ll see if he can get her back.
There are going to be issues with Katie and issues at his job, and there’s a lot for him to deal with, which is great and challenging for the character, and maybe an opportunity for the character to grow towards something else.
Rachel mentioned something about a reckoning, and I was thinking about how it applies to so many characters right now.
Yeah. That was the idea of doing the episode this way. It was such a different format and structure. Did you like us breaking the mold like that? Was that cool?
I loved having everybody in the same environment, interacting in ways we don’t usually get without the interruption of a medical emergency.
There was so much going on at the time and getting to see so many characters play off one another in the same scenes was fun. I mean, it sucks that it was after a funeral, and there was so much drama for one day. But it had your eyes pinging from one moment to the next.
It’s fun seeing everyone not in blue scrubs or a white lab coat, but everyone looking gorgeous in their black suits and black dresses. I saw everyone. I was like, “Wow, what a gorgeous cast, you know?”
They’re all so pretty. I hate it! [Laughs]
I was there physically on that day in Toronto when they were shooting the stuff at Rachel’s house, and it was just cool to see everyone like that. So, I was imagining, well, if it feels like that for me, it must be like that for the audience.
Joan, of course, is hiding hand tremors and is also very hard on Amy for her own health issues. Will her secrecy come to a head anytime soon? And should viewers read Joan as a tough-love friend or a potential foe?
That’s the fun thing, we want the audience a little bit on their toes. Is she a tough love friend, or is she a foe, or is she a little bit of both? Of course, she has her own secrets, and she doesn’t want Amy to remember that she knows that because she didn’t like how Amy reacted in the past.
So, of course, that will have to come out in the back half of the season and be a big point of conflict in the hospital. If some of the characters start to pick up on the fact that Joan’s got some deficiencies, that’s going to create some suspense and some drama.
Jake’s arc of losing his father was a tragically beautiful way to give us both the background on his character we needed, but also to remove the doubts anyone had about how deep Amy and Jake’s love is. Were those intentional writing choices to make?
Yeah, we had always talked about that. With this season having 22 episodes, it was an opportunity to really expand.
The first season, the storytelling was very condensed with ten, and we’re meeting everyone year one. But now we’ve met Sonya’s father, the billionaire, and Gina’s sister, and we will eventually meet Michael’s parents in a little bit. We wanted to fill everyone out.
We knew we wanted to bring in the father. And I was sitting there one day in the writers’ room, wondering how we were going to get Amy and Jake back together.
We know we want them to be together, but we’ve set such strong obstacles.
First of all, Jake is kind of jealous of Michael and the transgression with her kissing Michael last year, and now Joan said, “Don’t do this. Your career is on the line.”
And it kind of just hit me, “Oh, you know, death of a loved one makes people very focused on different priorities: life is short, and what do I want today, and what do I need?’
And so that breakdown, the vulnerability that he has when he calls her at the end of the previous episode, and opens up, and he’s having the memories of that she met the father, and that the father loved, you know, they only met one night, but he really took a liking to her.
We thought that’s such a real, honest, raw thing that happens, and so it did serve many purposes to understand Jake, where he comes from, what his background is, why loyalty is so important to him, and some of his limitations. We learn about how Rachel cheated on him.
He could never forgive her.
Even though his sister’s saying, “Come on, you guys are…” like we see this strong sense of him, and then the fact that he’s drawn to, he’s able to forgive Amy, it all just came together, and as a way to do something special, different, break the mold with the structure, which is always good for a finale.
So it all came together really organically.
Then, of course, we got Peter Friedman, the legendary Peter Friedman, to play his father.
I was a huge fan of Succession, and I saw him off-Broadway a couple of years ago in this amazing play called The Job, and so when Peter agreed to do it, we were just over the moon, and it obviously just, he comes in, and like that character feels lived in in the first 30 seconds.
He really did. I was locked into that storyline. I loved, of course, too, just even kind of getting to dig into Jake’s faith in a really natural, organic way. The grave scene with his daughter, explaining it, the gathering, and the food. I love all those little details and aspects.
That was really beautiful.
Obviously, I’m of Jewish heritage, so that was a cool thing for me to be able to present some of those specific traditions that are in all different cultures, but it’s in my culture that, it gives it an air of specificity and soulfulness to it that really brings the audience in and gives the audience a chance to see Jake as a father.
Then, of course, it helps that Amy’s watching him be such a, you know, great father in that moment, and that just makes her want him more, and, you know, it was a very cool confluence of all the aspects.
Right, and then Jake firmly chooses her in the end. Can we anticipate that they’re back to being a united front, just combating all these other outside elements?
Whenever you’re telling the story of a romance, especially a difficult one, whether it’s — one of my favorite movies is The Way We Were — the yearning, the obstacles, but they have to come together.
It’s a very tricky thing to calibrate. How long can we keep them apart before the audience gets impatient, and we get impatient, we feel it, and so I think we feel it like an audience member.
We were getting to the point of going, we sort of follow our own feeling and instinct, like, okay, it’s time, we’ve got to get over, create the obstacles, which are great, and then you’ve got to move through them, and then create new ones.
So, yeah, they’re in it, but the obstacles are still there, the emotional obstacles, the work obstacles; they have to keep it a secret now.
We’ve met Rachel, and we know that Jake has a lifelong bond and connection with her. We know that he only divorced her because she cheated on him, not because he fell out of love with her, so we know that even though you’ve been wounded, you might not be able to turn off that switch.
Of course, now the irony is that Amy started the season yearning for Michael, and now Michael might be available again, so just, we love the idea that she gets together with Jake, and at the same moment, Michael is becoming available again, and so will that become a thing?
There are always new layers to the love triangle!
We spoke more with Hank Steinberg, about that cliffhanger, Richard Miller’s return, and what to expect from the revenge plot and Hannah’s conflict.
Check out the second part of our interview tomorrow!
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