The Good Doctor S2 Ep 17 - Recap

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The Good Doctor Season 2 Episode 17

The writers continue to torment The Good Doctor fans this week. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse for our Shaun, they did. I should know better than to think like that.

Shaun Is A Surgeon!

There were the two usual patient story lines this week, but because of the situation with Shaun I didn’t really care about them, to be honest. However, they both tied into Shaun, in that he helped in both cases.

A mother (a friend of Lim’s) is accused of abusing her baby when tests suggest that the baby was shaken, and after Lim makes the difficult choice of turning in her friend, Shaun discovers that the baby’s internal bleed actually resulted from delivery.

In the other case, a young guy has a huge tumor (100 pounds!)! During surgery, Melendez wants Shaun in to consult, but Dr. Han says no. Melendez refuses to back down, going to bat for his patient, and Shaun gets called in, which makes him very happy. It makes us all happy. It’s short lived though—Shaun does come through and offer a life saving suggestion, but he isn’t allowed to take part in the surgery.

At the end of the day, Shaun goes to Dr. Han and demands to be reinstated as a surgeon. Despite what Shaun has done for the patients, Dr. Han still says no (I think at this point Dr. Han is just being an ass and being stubborn). So that’s when Shaun breaks down. He screams over and over, “I am a surgeon!” Dr. Han warns him that he’s about to get fired, but Shaun continues screaming. Does Dr. Han fire him? It appears so, as next we find Shaun cleaning out his locker. He spills his backpack all over the floor, and his breakdown gets worse, Shaun is literally falling apart. But when he picks up his scalpel that his brother gave him and breaks the blade, this pushes him over the edge. Shaun is on the floor, crying, heaving, totally destroyed, when Claire comes in and finds him there. She picks up his stuff and sits on the floor close to him, but doesn’t try to speak.

In Other News

Dr. Glassman is cancer free! Yay! And he is also a changed man, as pointed out by Dr. Blaize when he gives her his prized baseball (didn’t Lea have a prized baseball, too?).
Lim and Melendez are about to come clean about their relationship. Throughout the episode they were both freaking out because they thought Shaun had seen them kissing, so by the end of the episode they’ve gone to Andrews to tell him about their relationship.

The episode ends with a very sad Shaun leaving the hospital in the rain.

Oh my gosh, such an emotional, heart wrenching episode. I hate you, Dr. Han.

I leave you with this tweet from twitter user @grove_kathy which sums up how we’re all feeling: