Season 2, Episode 12 – Inquisition

With Hannah by his side, Charlie is admitted to Westside in critical condition after overdosing. Jake gets assigned to his case. Joan asks Jake if he can manage his emotions and try to find out anything he can from Hannah about what she thinks happened between Amy and Brian. Clearly, Jake knows about the hack and Joan knows that Jake is still part of Amy’s inner circle, even if she doesn’t know for sure that they are together again. 

Joan and Jake treat Charlie throughout the episode. Joan ends up doing emergency surgery to save Charlie, and we see her popping a pill in preparation for the surgery. After the surgery, TJ sees Joan struggling with her hand shaking.  

The FBI identified Charlie as the hacker by matching his voice from a social media video, and now the hospital board wants to know why Charlie and Hannah were seeking revenge against Amy. While the FBI waits for Charlie to come out of a coma, the board launches an investigation into why Brian Clark left the hospital. They want to know if Amy was out of line in her treatment of him and if he was forced to resign. They seem determined to blame the hack on Amy.  

Throughout the work day, an investigator hired by the hospital questions staff members about Amy’s behavior towards Brian. The staff list includes Sonya, Julie, Liz, Lucy. They even bring Richard in. Julie tells the investigator that Brian left a patient on the surgical table and swiped everything off of Amy’s desk in anger, but the investigator doesn’t want to hear it. The investigator implies that Amy was responsible for the hostage crisis due to her bad relationship with Rosie’s father, but again Julie defends Amy. Sonya gets called in for questioning along the same lines as Julie, and she also defends Amy repeatedly. 

We see a series of flashbacks to five years ago. First, Amy humiliates Brian in front of patients and staff after he made a mistake with her patient. Then she walks into the hallway and sees Michael. He asks her to go to the symphony that night. It’s the same scene we saw in Season 2, Episode 2, but now we have more context. At one point, the hospital investigator says that this incident occurred on October 14, 2019, which we know from Season 2, Episode 9 was before Amy became Chief. 

The flashbacks continue as Michael runs into Richard on his way out of the hospital. They talk as old friends. They miss hanging out as couples, but Michael says it’s still too hard for Amy. Richard says he’s really worried about her. She’s not the same person and needs help. Michael tells Richard that he’s going to talk to Joan about it because she’s having dinner with Amy that night and may be the only person who can get through to her. We know from Season 2, Episode 2 that this was the dinner when Joan told Amy to leave Michael.  

In the present, Richard is questioned by the hospital investigator and throws Amy under the bus at every opportunity. The last scene of Richard if with his lawyer at dinner. They have something up their sleeve and plan to reveal information to Max and the board when they go in for the Dixon hearing. We just don’t know what the information is yet…  

Amy does her own investigation into what happened between her and Brian Clark. She figures out that Brian did in fact leave a patient on the surgical table. Amy meets with Julie, who tells her that the investigator is biased and didn’t want to know anything bad about Brian. Amy calls TJ’s dad, a cop, to gather background information about Brian, only to find out that he had accumulated massive debt and was drowning. Amy presents this information to the investigator, but he doesn’t want to hear any of it and gets aggressive with her. With nothing left to lose, Amy confronts Hannah about the hack. 

While Amy is in Charlie’s room confronting Hannah, Charlie crashes. Amy inadvertently saves him by noticing something that everyone else missed. Once Charlie is stable, Hannah’s mom thanks Amy for saving her son. She tells Amy that she knew Brian was struggling with gambling and that Amy tried to help him. She says she’ll tell that to anyone who will listen. 

As the investigator talks to Hannah’s mom, Gina, Amy, and Jake watch with relief, knowing that the nightmare is over and no one can blame Amy for the hack anymore. Gina makes a cute comment about Amy and Jake needing some alone time, letting us know that she’s in the know even if their relationship is still a secret. 

Throughout the episode, Michael struggles to stand up for Amy and do his job as CMO impartially. Although Michael and Joan knew about the confrontation with Brian Clark, they didn’t know who Brian was at the time and didn’t put the pieces together that it had anything to do with the hack. Max and the board don’t believe them and think they deliberately withheld information to defend Amy’s reputation. Max calls Amy the most problematic doctor in the hospital. 

Amy thanks Joan for being there for her all day. Joan really was in Amy’s corner. She even confronted Michael in front of Amy and Gina because he wasn’t standing up for Amy enough to Max and the board. Amy also thanks Sonya for defending her to the hospital investigator and apologizes for her outburst in Season 2, Episode 10. Amy says that Jake is sick of them fighting because he cares about them both.