Doctor Odyssey Set Up Potential Exits For Its Stars, And I Have Strong Feelings About What Phillipa Soo’s Avery Needs To Do

Spoiler alert! This story discusses the April 17 episode of Doctor Odyssey, “Crew Week.” If you’re not caught up, the episode can be streamed with a Hulu subscription.

We’re only three episodes away from Doctor Odyssey’s season finale airing on the 2025 TV schedule, and ABC has yet to confirm whether the Ryan Murphy medical drama will get a sophomore season. To that end, it seems the show is starting to map potential futures for its main characters that could have them disembarking the ship for good. We’ll have to see how things ultimately play out, but I’ve got pretty strong feelings about what Avery should do.

“Crew Week” saw the employees of The Odyssey taking a week with no passengers. For Max (Joshua Jackson), that meant going to visit his 1-minute-older twin brother (naturally also played by Joshua Jackson) and his family — not to mention a job interview that theoretically set up a post-Doctor Odyssey plan for Max.

In Max’s absence he left Avery (Phillipa Soo) in charge of all things medical. Avery got her own potential exit strategy, as after learning that she was never pregnant with Max or Tristan’s baby, she put her original plan back in action and plans to leave in a few weeks for medical school. While I don’t think that would be very good for the show (or for what I’d love to see from Doctor Odyssey Season 2), I feel very strongly that she should do this, based on the events of this episode.

Avery has time and again proven to be smart and capable, but in “Crew Week” we still saw her co-workers — not strangers, but people who know her — questioning her medical decisions. Forget the fact that she was in charge and saved Rosie’s foot and Spencer’s life. This episode proved that the Odyssey crew members only see Avery as a love interest and don’t respect her as a full human.

Not only has Avery been pursued romantically by both Max and Tristan (Sean Teale) this entire season — that’s 100% of the people she works with in the medical bay — we learned in this episode that she also previously had a situationship with Spencer (Marcus Emanuel Mitchell). He seemed interested in starting things back up (before the parasites attacked his nervous system, of course), while Max and Tristan both basically said, “No baby, no problem,” and professed their love. Can’t a girl just perform an MRI in peace?

Now, showing that Tristan was also hooking up with Laura Harrier’s Vivan (yes, another “V” name after vixens Veronica, Victoria And Vanessa took over “Spring Break”) at least proved that Avery isn’t the Smurfette of the Odyssey, but Vivian seemed to only be there to make Tristan realize how much he actually wanted to be with Avery and not her.

Vivian and Avery both deserve better.

I’m assuming that medical school for Avery and Max’s job offer at Mike O’Malley’s miserable hospital are there as possible futures for their characters should Season 2 not happen, so I don’t actually want either of those characters to take those roads. But if Avery does decide to stay on that boat, I hope she starts getting the respect she deserves.

Doctor Odyssey returns at 9 p.m. ET Thursday, May 1, on ABC, with three episodes to go before the season finale.