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As should be obvious, I haven’t been keeping up on blogging this show. Partly that’s been due to the hectic nature of the holiday season, and partly due to not really having much to say about it other than doing simple recaps. It’s yet another sign that this is a series that’s definitely flagging in the final stretch. I’ll spend the next couple days catching up, starting with Nov. 11 episode, or as I like to call it, “The Extra-Sucky Life of Sean McNamara.”
Ostensibly, this is an episode about the difficulty of dealing with family. The titular patient is a concert patient coming to McNamara/Troy to remove a mass of tissue from her shoulder that resulted from a partially-developed twin in the womb. After being raised to treat the mass as an actual sister (named Moira), she’s finally ready to cut that tie, only to find that maybe she’s not quite as ready as she thought.
While it’s yet another quirky patient with a somewhat disturbing dilemma, it’s an obvious commentary on the difficulty everyone else is having with Matt, currently on the run with a barely healed shotgun wound to the gut. Julia’s convinced that Matt’s behavior is a sign of her and Sean’s failure as parents, and is ready to take Annie and Connor back to New York. Christian’s advocating the tough-love approach of turning him in. Sean, meanwhile, is still reeling from Teddy’s disappearance and is completely unsure what to do.
Part of the episode is taken up with Matt’s flight, including a strange middle section that seems to have Kimber ready to run off with him, daughter in tow, only for it to turn out to be a setup on Christian’s part. Meanwhile, Sean comes face to face not only with Teddy’s murderer (they found her head in his car), but the fact that Teddy intended to kill him and his kids for the life insurance.
After taking those hits, he gets a call from Matt, whose gut wound has laid him up in a motel near the border. True to form, Sean runs to his aid, but not alone. The reveal that he’s brought the police with him is one of the show’s better moments, and Dylan Walsh nails it, as he does the episode’s final scene. After dumping Teddy’s ashes in a trash can at the beach the next morning, Sean strips off his clothes and begins to swim out into the ocean. It’s pretty clear that he’s not intending to come back.
While I’m glad the season has kept plots moving forward without dwelling on any one plotline too long (like Teddy – good riddance), there’s no sense of a thematic or plot arc connecting everything. The characters just keep bouncing from one crappy situation to the next. It’s easy to see why Sean wants to chuck it all in, and that’s unfortunate. This was one of my favorite series in its prime, but now it’s just getting harder and harder to keep watching or caring.
