Season 2, Episode 8 – He Loved You

Hannah and Charlie sit in Hannah’s apartment reading through Amy’s emails. We see an email from Gina to Dr Marks, Amy’s new neurologist assigned by Joan. The email says that Amy’s accident was 6 months ago, which helps to ground the timeline of this episode. Hannah and Charlie find recordings of Amy’s memory recovery sessions. They listen to the recorded sessions throughout the episode and eventually find one that they say will blow up everyone’s lives. 

Katie comes to the hospital to be with Amy during a full day of neurological tests. Katie tells Amy she’s not worried about missing school because she’s a second semester senior who already got into college. (It seems like the writers decided to make Katie a year older than in Season 1, although it’s only been 6 months since the accident, but let’s go with it.) Katie finds Michael in the hospital and asks him to come support Amy with her, saying they are her only family. We don’t know anything about Amy’s parents or other family yet, but at this point it seems like they aren’t a part of Amy’s life. 

In a testing session with Dr Marks, Amy tells him that she needs to keep chasing her memories because she is missing the last year of Danny’s life. Dr Marks uses a machine to stimulate a specific part of her brain, and she gets new memory flashes of Danny, Katie, Michael, Jake, and Brian Clark (this time in a doctor’s coat). The memory of Danny is his 7th birthday party. We know from Season 2, Episode 6 that Danny’s Birthday was April 17, 2009, so his 7th birthday would have been April 17, 2016. 

After the memory flashes, Amy gets a bad headache and nosebleed. She says she’s fine and wants to continue the testing, but Dr Marks insists she take medication to calm the stimulated area of the her brain, which also stops memory recovery. Throughout the episode, Amy refuses to follow Dr Marks’s orders, and eventually she collapses in the hospital hallway. Katie, Michael, and Joan all tell Amy she has to take the medication and stop focusing on her memories. Katie is very upset and tells Amy that chasing her memories isn’t helping and she needs to stop looking backwards.  

Michael talks to Gina as she is being discharged from the hospital. Michael says that she needs to take better care of herself and have better boundaries with her patients. He says he’s known Gina for 24 years, and he knows that she didn’t do anything intentionally wrong when she crossed the line trying to save her patient in Season 2, Episode 7. 

Jake treats a patient who holds a special place in his heart, sort of a father figure. Rachel comes to the hospital to tell Jake that his dad passed away, which triggers several memories of Amy and his dad. First, we see a flashback of Jake and Amy in the morning at her condo. Jake invites her to dinner with his dad, who is in town from Arizona, and we see the dinner with his dad. Jake has to leave the dinner to take care of a patient. Amy bonds with Jake’s dad. They talk about Jake losing his mom at age 14 and being so self-sufficient from then on. Jake’s dad tells Amy that he thinks he failed Jake. Later in bed, Amy tells Jake this and encourages him to tell his dad how he feels about him.. That was the last time he saw his dad. 

Jake pushes down emotions while trying to save his special patient’s life, which leads to him lashing out at Sonya and the surgeons who refuse to operate on his patient beacuse it’s too risky. Finally, Joan agrees to do the surgery. Jake is so grateful, and we see a nice moment between them. Joan calls her doctor to make sure it’s still ok for her to operate, given her symptoms. Joan goes ahead with the surgery on Jake’s patient, and the patient survives. 

At bedtime, Jake calls Amy and tells her that his dad died this morning. He asks if she’ll come to the funera, says how much he missed her today, and tells her that his dad really loved her even though they only met once. Amy says she wishes she could remember meeting his dad and that if he’s anything like his son, she’s sure she loved him. It feels like a turning point because Amy and Jake haven’t talked on a personal level in a while.. 

Throughout the episode, Sonya teases TJ about Liz. She’s very amused by the TJ and Liz idea. By the end of the day, though, TJ tells Liz that a workplace relationship is too complicated.