‘The Good Doctor’: A Patient Confuses — Then Shocks — in the Season 5 Premiere (RECAP)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Good Doctor Season 5 premiere “New Beginnings.”]

The good news: Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore) and Lea Dilallo (Paige Spara) are getting married (and it hopefully won’t end like her dreams). The bad news: There’s a big change coming to the hospital in The Good Doctor Season 5.

But first, the joy: Lea takes a nightmare — a thunderstorm interrupting the ceremony — to kick off the premiere in stride, deciding they just won’t have an outdoor wedding. She’s taking care of all the planning, for the engagement party and the wedding. She wants to make it perfect, he tells Dr. Lim (Christina Chang) and Dr. Park (Will Yun Lee), while all he cares about is marrying her. That’s sweet, but as they warn him, planning a wedding is a big undertaking.

Lea insists to Shaun that she can handle everything, but she also cuts him off when he begins telling her about a patient. Then things begin going wrong — including the florist trying to back out of meeting a deadline (until Lea threatens to call her fiancé, a lawyer) — and after another nightmare, she declares the engagement party off. (The wedding’s still on, though.)

Jordan’s (Bria Samoné Henderson) the one to convince Lea to change her mind. As the bride-to-be explains, the first time she got married, it was a disaster, as was the marriage, so she needs to get this one right. But as the doctor points out, if she’s not willing to risk the little things going wrong, she’ll never have the chance to have the big things go right.

The party’s back on, with Park convincing Shaun to let a medical mystery sit overnight to head over to the party sooner rather than later. And by the end of the episode, Shaun tells Lea he’s going to help her plan the wedding so it’ll be on both of them if things go right or wrong.

ABC/Jeff Weddell

As for what’s likely about to become a problem for the staff, it all begins with a patient who asks a lot of questions, Salen Morrison (Rachel Bay Jones), who Morgan (Fiona Gubelmann) and Jordan see in the clinic. Salen them finds her way into Dr. Glassman’s (Richard Schiff) office and asks if he identifies more as a doctor or the hospital president, and that’s not the last time she wanders off.

After Jordan informs her she can’t eat anything before a biopsy, she finds Salen in the server room … and she’s already eaten half a sandwich. Then after asking who the chief of surgery is, Salen goes to find Lim to ask her opinion on her treatment before collapsing. Morgan, Jordan, Asher (Noah Galvin), and Andrews (Hill Harper) are left to ponder her symptoms — kidney lesions, shortness of breath, swollen ankles, and heart irregularities — and wonder if she’s messing with them. She didn’t stop taking her meds, they realize.

It turns out that Salen has been hiding that she’s already been diagnosed, seven years ago, after having symptoms for three: scleroderma. She went off her meds to see if they were like the bad doctors she’s had in the past because she was curious.

ABC/Jeff Weddell

But wait, that’s not all: Salen is purchasing the hospital, Glassman tells Lim in the final scene. “I’m looking forward to working with both of you,” Salen tells them.

Elsewhere around St. Bonaventure:

• How’s Andrews handling his split from his wife? By dating a lot, to the point that he accidentally invites two women to the engagement party. (They end up leaving together.) He does go home with the bartender, who gives him the same morning after treatment he gave someone else earlier: She leaves.
• Dr. Glassman reveals Debbie left him a couple months ago during his toast to Shaun and Lea at the party.

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• Morgan and Park are still together.
• Mateo’s (Osvaldo Benavides) no longer a wanted man, staying with Lim … and maybe getting a job at the hospital, pending how Salen’s big move might affect the plan. Lim had been planning to pitch him to the board when she learned that news.

The Good Doctor, Mondays, 10/9c, ABC