Warning: spoilers are ahead for the Season 10 premiere of Chicago Med on NBC, called "Sink or Swim."
Let it not be said that Chicago Med starts seasons on a slow note, because the Season 10 premiere in the 2024 TV schedule delivered a huge crisis to swamp the ED with critical patients, established a breakup for Dr. Charles, resolved Ripley's cliffhanger for Hannah, featured Goodwin back in scrubs, said goodbye to two doctors, and introduced two new ones. This was also the first episode under the guidance of new showrunner Allen MacDonald, who opened up about what to expect from the newcomers in the wake of two losses.
Goodbye To Two Doctors
Alas, the tenth season isn't going to get close to 200 episodes with all the doctors from Season 9 returning. Dr. Crockett Marcel's departure was the first one revealed, but at least this one wasn't a surprise. News broke over the summer that Dominic Rains wouldn't be reprising his role for Season 10. In the premiere, we learned via Dr. Archer that Crockett's goodbye party had been just the night before and he's "sleeping it off on a plane to Boston about now." Given the length of the time jump, Crockett evidently stuck around the hospital for about a month after the events of the Season 9 finale.
The bigger surprise of "Sink or Swim" was the fate of Dr. Zach Hudgins, who recurred on Med in Seasons 8 and 9 as an ED resident. Unfortunately, the overload of patients in the Emergency Department due to the capsized ship and another hospital shutting down was also an overload of trauma for Zach, who froze up and then fled when working a patient with Goodwin.
Goodwin was able to save the patient's life when he coded without a doctor present, but new ED co-chief Dr. Caitlin Lenox had a zero-tolerance policy for ED doctors who panic and abandon patients. She fired him unceremoniously by the end of the hour.
And that brings us to not only Lenox, but the other newcomer to Gaffney in the Season 10 premiere!
What To Expect From The Newcomers
"Sink or Swim" introduced Dr. Caitlin Lenox and Dr. John Frost, both of whom will have major presences in Season 10. When I spoke with new showrunner Allen MacDonald ahead of One Chicago returning to Wednesdays this fall, he hyped their arrivals:
Well, I'm very excited about mixing up the Chicago Med family in the ED by bringing in these new characters. The first one I'll talk about is Dr Caitlin Lenox, who's played by Sarah Ramos, a very, very talented actress. I was on set when both Darren Barnet and Sarah Ramos did their first scenes, and truly I got a chill, and it was like, 'Oh, we chose the right people for these roles, and they are popping, and it's going to be electric.'
For her part, Lenox quickly proved to be an assertive and capable physician, but got off to a bad start with Archer when he discovered that he would have to share ED Chief duties with her as an equal. According to the showrunner, that clash between the doctors didn't end with the Season 10 premiere. MacDonald shared:
As far as Lenox, I felt that I wanted to see Dr Archer get charged up. I wanted to bring someone in that is a little more curmudgeonly than him, even though she's younger, and give him a little bit of his own medicine and just see how that rolls out. We have a lot of scripts now, and basically those two characters clash a lot, which is exactly what I wanted. And they clash in this beautiful way. Lenox is very efficient. She cares about her patients, but she doesn't want to spend too much time with them, because that gets in the way of efficiency. Her way of being a very human doctor is to be able to help as many people as possible, and that means moving them through as quickly as possible.
Efficiency was essential in the Season 10 premiere when the ED was so flooded with traumas that even Dr. Charles was in the thick of the action rather than his usual role as a psychiatrist, and Lenox was key to lives being saved by adapting. It's also hard to blame Archer for being more curmudgeonly than usual upon meeting her, since it was very suddenly sprung on him that he was going to have to share his job with somebody else. Allen MacDonald went on:
That is the attitude that she comes from. She's former military, just as Archer is, and so they have that in common. You would think that that would be a thing that would bond them, but actually, it agitates them both that the other's in the military. I think they don't like that they have that in common. Lenox is going to be somewhat of a mystery through a lot of this season, because I want her to remain a very incendiary presence, for lack of a better word, but we will, as the season progresses, get little peeks into her background and why she's the way she is.
Fans shouldn't expect to get all the answers about Lenox right off the bat, and it's clear that learning she comes from an Army background was enough backstory for Dr. Archer as a Navy vet to get snarky with her. As for the other new character, the showrunner teased a few more details about the doctor who dropped by Gaffney to talk Maggie and then Dr. Abrams into treating his young patient. MacDonald previewed:
Dr. John Frost is a new pediatrician who's coming to the hospital. Darren is also just this talent machine that we're so excited to have aboard, but Frost cares very deeply about children, and there's a reason for that that we will reveal as the season goes along, but he did not have a great childhood. There are some more specifics that I think I will keep to myself for now, but I'll just say that his parents did not do right by him, and he at some point had to cut his ties with them, move forward, put himself through medical school, and start a career as a pediatrician. I just don't think he even realizes consciously how much his childhood was a part of his decision to go into pediatrics.
Frost wasn't officially part of the Gaffney team by the end of the finale, but given that he impressed Maggie and is on the verge of being out of a job due to his hospital closing, it's not hard to see why he'll be the next person to join the team. Plus, he earned a compliment from Dr. Abrams, which is no easy feat! He'll also be Med's first pediatrician in the ED since Guy Lockard as Dr. Dylan Scott.
Keep tuning in to NBC on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET to see more of the newcomers on Chicago Med Season 10, followed by Chicago Fire Season 13 at 9 p.m. ET and Chicago P.D. Season 12 at 10 p.m. ET. You'll also be able to stream new episodes next day with a Peacock subscription.
