‘Doc’ Reveals Major Role Joan Played in Big Decision for Amy

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Doc Season 2 Episode 2 “Delusions of Grandeur.”]

Just as Amy’s (Molly Parker) beginning to regain memories she’d lost in a car accident, she gets a blast from her past, with her mentor and friend, Joan (Felicity Huffman), returning to the hospital — and in the final scene of the Tuesday, September 30, episode of Doc, she remembers a key dinner the two shared.

At first, it seems like the time Amy’s spending in a sensory deprivation tank isn’t working, but soon after, she reunites with Joan and has a flash of the dinner and dessert. Another conversation between the two women results in Amy remembering Joan telling her she has no choice. When she asks Joan about it, the other doctor says they’ve had a lot of dinners and there have been a lot of choices in the last eight years, so she’ll think on it.

That dinner was from five years earlier, one that Amy attended rather than join her then-husband Michael (Omar Metwally) for a night out together. And when Michael had talked to Joan back then, he’d asked her to mediate since he could barely get Amy to show up for couples counseling and his wife trusted and looked up to her. “We’re not surviving this,” he admitted. Joan told him she’d do whatever she could.

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It’s at the end of the episode, after Amy finds out that Joan’s the new chief — more on that shortly — that she remembers the dinner and their conversation. Joan had seemed to advocate for couples counseling (not so much individual therapy), arguing it forced both parties to communicate. But Amy didn’t think there was anything left to be said. And that was when Joan told her that Michael has always held her back and when she looked at him, she only saw the man she thought let her son die. What she had to do was hard but clear, and she had no choice: She had to leave him. (Clearly that had a major effect on Amy.)

As for the chief job, Michael chooses Joan after she recommends he not hire anyone asking for it. He tells her he knows she doesn’t like to be tied down. She thinks he’s still trying to take care of Amy despite his new family. (Notably, when his wife Nora asks if he still loves her, he only tells her he loves her and isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t directly answer her question.) Michael then appeals to the side of Joan that goes where she’s needed and asks for just a year. She, in turn, makes it three years, with no non-compete, complete autonomy in hiring, firing, and the budget, and no board reviews for a year. She also needs one day a week of guaranteed, dedicated OR time and the ability to name her successor. She can’t have the last one, but they shake after she asks for veto power.

Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox