This is an episode up to the standard we have come to expect from Chicago Med - a bit of gore, a lot of tension, a fair bit of action, some fun and politics thrown in and some subtle touches of emotion. The fun here came in the storyline that named the episode - the guy who felt he had someone else living inside him. That story also provides much of the gore and eventually much of the pathos. For me, the real emotion was in the story of the family struggling to understand their daughter's death, while equally struggling with their relationship with their son. The outcome really touched me.
I agree with those reviewers who find some characters annoying (although I'm fairly certain that they are inserted deliberately, as a burr to get the audience buzzing!). My nominations for Annoying Characters are Noah Sexton (he is such an immature layabout/chancer! He would have been "advised to change his course" by the end of his first term in any University with a medical school that I know). And as for being able to behave in a hospital as he does... nah! Robin Charles would be my next nomination (it was a good part until she got
"cured" and the writers started to drag out the loose ends of her not-quite-cured illness). My third nomination for Most Annoying Character is... Stohl the Troll. He's quite amusing, but so counter to morale (in any organisation!) that any competent hospital administrator would have guided him into a different career a long time ago. He reminds me of a guy where I worked who
absolutely knew that he knew how to do Absolutely Anything! He had the fatal flaw of not being aware of his own deficiencies. So he was shunted from department to department by managers who recognised his
ability to cause damage in their department but could not (couldn't be bothered to?) come up with grounds for actually sacking him! Eventually, he became so frustrated by his lack of progress that, one weekend, he broke into his current manager's personnel files in order to find proof that he was being unjustly held back. That was enough for dismissal, and we all heaved a sigh of relief!
I find I have to disagree with the reviewer(s) who dislike(s) the Ava Bekker character, either because of the character itself, the portrayal or the accent.
I liked the original character (although I didn't really understand where it went eventually - scriptwriters squeezing storylines out of stones if they had to!) and I liked the portrayal by Norma Kuhling. About 47% of my immediate family (parents, children, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins) are medical. I grew up in the company of medics, such as Norman Dott, first Professor of Neurosurgery in the University of Edinburgh, and his identical twin brother, the neurologist Dr Dott. They, and any medics I have known since, build an armour around them.
It is the only way they can protect themselves from the pain of decisions they have to make every minute of every day (and, particularly if you are a surgeon, anaesthetist or other theatre staff,
every millisecond of every day). So to me Norma Kuhling's portrayal of an accomplished experienced surgeon was spot-on and cannot be faulted. If anything, she "humanised" too early in the series.
As to her accent, it sounded to me very close to the accent of several South Africans I have known. I reckon it might be one of the Johannesburg accents, rather than Cape Town.
To guidokuwas14, do you even know what "A South African Accent" sounds like? How many *different* accents are there in South Africa?
In Edinburgh, a city of about 1m in Scotland, there are at least a dozen accents... Grange, Morningside, Leith, Musselburgh... you get the picture.
So, if we have a dozen accents in a metropolitan area of 1m citizens, what do we find in South Africa?
South Africa has 16 municipalities (Wikipedia:2022) with a population greater than 1m, all of Johannesburg, Cape Town, eThakwini, Ekurhuleni and Tshashwane being greater than 2m population.
And then there's the country! When I moved to work in Fife 50-ish years ago there were people in villages less than a mile apart who could not communicate completely because their dialects
(not just accents!) were completely different. What do you think is the linguistic situation in rural South Africa? South Africa is a country of many tongues, languages and accents.
I am happy to accept Norma Kuhling's best attempt at one of these accents as being a good representation of a South African accent. She is a skilled performer and is good it her job.
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