‘Doc’: Molly Parker Talks Amy & Jake’s Relationship, Hack Consequences & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Doc Season 2 Episode 10 “Chief.”]

The hack against Amy (Molly Parker) — by Hannah (Emma Pfitzer Price) and her brother Charlie (Daniel Gravelle), more him than her, because they blame her for their father’s suicide — has major consequences in the January 6 midseason premiere of Doc.

Because of the hack, a blood test that would have helped diagnose multiple patients didn’t go through, and as a result, one of the three died. It’s something that both Hannah and Charlie have to live with as the episode ends. Meanwhile, watching parents deal with losing their son, a teenager, leads to Amy having memory flashes of the son she lost.

Below, Molly Parker unpacks the midseason premiere, Amy and Jake’s relationship, and more.

This was a heartbreaking episode. Chris’ death, the flashbacks that Amy was having … How is Amy doing as she’s having more memories of Danny?

Molly Parker: I think it’s really tricky because on the one hand, she wants every bit of her memory back. She wants the good stuff and the bad stuff. On the other hand, the fact that Amy doesn’t have a kind of conscious, physical, visceral understanding memory of the trauma that she went through upon Danny’s death has allowed her in the present to be much lighter, I think. It’s not that she still hasn’t lost him, she has, but the experience of loss is very different this time around, partly because everyone isn’t going through it at the same time. Also because for her, the loss has been so global. It means she’s lost Danny, but she’s also lost Michael, she’s lost these years of Katie’s life. She’s lost so much that she hasn’t been able to focus just purely on her pain around losing Danny.

So, she’s processing her grief in a different way than she did the first time around. We see her making an effort throughout Season 2 to consciously process her grief. She takes Katie to the cemetery. She is trying to be present for her daughter, her own feelings. It’s hard. She wants all of [her memories about Danny] because there’s this big missing part, and there was a year of — this time that she doesn’t remember her son at all, and that is almost worse to her than the lack of him right now.

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She’s thrown her hat in now for chief resident, but as Joan (Felicity Huffman) warns her, any side effects from her memory treatments will be a factor. So how torn is Amy about where to focus and how much to risk one over the other?

Yeah, it’s funny. It’s been an ongoing conversation that we’ve been having, and I think part of what we’re going to see over these next few episodes is Amy’s relationship to her own ambition. Why did she want to be chief in the first place? What was that about? We see her in some flashbacks with Brian and Scott, and they tell a very different story than she remembers of herself. She remembers, I didn’t even want to be chief, and somehow that happened, and they talk about her as, she’s ambitious to a fault and she’s cutthroat and she’s competitive. I think she really is an A-type personality who probably has always, always been competitive and always wanted to be the best, but I think that probably has had more to do originally with just her own relationship to herself. She’s a hard, hard worker.

After Danny dies, she is just never going to be in a position to allow a patient to die that she could have saved. And if that means working under people she arrogantly believes are less talented than her, she’s not going to do that. She’s going to put herself at the top of the heap. And that’s her justification. Her thinking is that it’s that important to her to save people. So nobody has to go through what she went through in losing Danny. So now in this present, it’s really interesting. It’s like, well, why does she want those things again? But I think what we see at the end of 210 is what she doesn’t want. She cannot be in a situation where she’s not allowed to trust her instincts and act on them.

Right now, it seems like Amy and Jake’s relationship is going well finally.

Yes!

They’ve been through a lot, but also hiding it at work, so it’s not perfect. How is Amy feeling about that? Especially because she is also friends with Joan, so it’s not just hiding it from her boss, it’s also hiding it from her friend.

Yeah. Well, there’s a couple things there. I think where Jake and Amy get to at this midpoint in the season is pretty hard earned. When they first got — OK, first of all, she doesn’t even remember the first time they got together. So who knows how that even happened. When they get together after the accident, both of them jump in way too soon. This woman is reeling from the loss in her life, and they just jump right into this. For him, back into something that, of course, is not going to be the same as what it was. And for her, it’s just this new person in a new situation. She hasn’t gotten over the old situation. When quite rightly, I think, Jake comes to that realization that, “You’re not ready. This can’t work. It might be good for you, but it’s not good for me.”

And so I feel like by the time we get to the midseason, they’ve both kind of worked pretty hard to put themself in a better place, and his dad dies. And when death comes into your life as it comes into all of our lives, it’s always this like, “Oh my God, this is it. This is all we have. There’s no more days guaranteed after today.” And given that, they’re going to be together because they clearly love each other. What’s tricky about — hard and wonderful — this particular love triangle between Amy and Jake and Amy and Michael is that these are both really good men and they’re really good men who are both really great for her in certain ways. So Amy’s trying hard to live in the present, and the present is Jake.

So every time Amy and Hannah interact, I’m like, oh, if Amy only knew…

It’s fun.

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Is she at all suspicious of Hannah about anything? Not that she would think, oh, she could be behind the hack, but is she looking at and thinking maybe there’s something going on that I don’t know about her?

I don’t think so. There’s a red flag that happens when Hannah first arrives, and it’s that she pretends she doesn’t know who she is, and she says, “Oh, you are the woman with the retrograde amnesia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And Amy introduces herself and literally later that day admits that her father worked at the hospital and that Amy was his boss. And it’s one of those that just — I think in the moment, Amy’s like, “Why would you? But you said this. Why would you lie?” And Hannah said, “Oh, I didn’t know what to do. And I felt nervous.” And I think Amy accepts that. And in the way that we’ve seen Joan has been Amy’s mentor, I think if this had gone differently, Amy would really become Hannah’s mentor. And I love that kind of diagonal line between these three women and us getting to see how the challenges of being a working woman when Joan was coming up versus when Amy was coming up and now Hannah, there’s lots to unpack there, but Hannah gets this information that just takes her off, way off, way off in a really bad way. So no, I don’t think Amy is suspicious.

But it seems like at the end of this episode, Hannah and Charlie are really grasping the ramifications of what they’ve done. We see they’re both very upset about what happens to Chris.

Well, I hope so.

What can you tease about what that means going forward? Are we going to see any changes perhaps in Hannah and the way that she’s interacting with Amy at work?

I would think so, yes. I think Amy thinks this is the first time Hannah’s lost a patient and that she is going to help her deal with that.

Scott Wolf is back in the flashbacks, which I loved. It’s good to see him again. Talk about just having him back. And the way Amy and Richard left things last season…

I know. I mean, look, the thing that I really loved about the first season and the relationship that Amy and Richard had was that these people were friends. We did a scene last season where he comes and brings his son to see Gina, and Amy’s just leaving the office. And I realized just as Molly the actor when we were doing that scene, that Amy knew this boy when he was little, he would’ve been one of the — and I have a son. And just like knowing those little guys when they’re 5 and 6 and 7 and 8, and now here he is, all messed up and dealing with this mental illness. And I just found it so heartbreaking. These people have that history.

And for whatever reason, after Danny dies, Amy just wants nothing to do with the people who were those family friends before, that they did family stuff, and the kids all played together and went swimming, and you fed them snacks. Amy can’t have that in her life, and she can’t have Richard in her life because he always wants to talk about how she feels, and she’s not going to talk to anybody about how she feels. And that is a kind of rejection and betrayal that pushes Richard to feel totally unsafe around her. So when he makes a mistake, he really believes that she is going to ruin his life for it. Whether that’s true or not, we will never know. But Richard thinks that is true. And so it’s just so tragic what he does after that. It’s like it’s never the thing. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s the coverup. He lies, and he covers, and he lies, and he covers, and then he blames her. And that, I think is just the thing that is so unforgivable to Amy because she is so vulnerable in that way. … I don’t think she’s been thinking about him at all. I think she’s been thinking about how to not be an intern for too long and how to fix all her relationships and help her daughter and get her memories back.

Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox