SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the two-part Season 2 finale of Fox’s Doc, “Stuck/Happy Birthday.”

Doc‘s Westside lost one of its own in the Season 2 finale. A deadly virus locked down the internal medicine floor of the Minneapolis hospital, with the patients and the staff attending to them trapped inside. As the virus spread, both patients and medical personnel got sick, including doctors Amy (Molly Parker), Richard (Scott Wolf) and nurse Liz (Conni Miu), who all got close to dying but it was the nurse who was among the first to come into contact with Patient Zero, Lucy (Paulyne Wei), who passed away, along with a couple of patients.

That is the first time we’ve seen a Westside staff member die. In an interview with Deadline, Doc executive producer Hank Steinberg, co-showrunner alongside series developer Barbie Kligman explained the decision to go with Lucy.

“We wanted to pick a character who’d been in the show from the beginning,” he said. “She was Amy’s nurse in the ICU in the pilot, so she was a familiar face and somebody that would land on the other nurses and everyone else,” he said. “We wanted to have a hit on the staff but we weren’t ready to kill off any of our regulars that we love. And so that was, we felt, a happy medium.”

Wei has appeared in 17 episodes over the two seasons, starting with the series premiere and ending with Part 1 of the Season 2 finale.

How will Lucy’s death affect her colleagues?

“It’s unclear yet exactly when we’ll pick up in the third season, we will probably fast forward a bit, but that for sure will hang over people; we like to make sure we carry things through, even if it’s not hitting over the head with it in the first episode, it might come up again in the fourth episode,” Steinberg said. “But we will definitely make sure that we are carrying that storyline through.”

He provided a status on Season 3 which, like Season 2, will consist of 22 episodes.

“The writers room starts this week,” he said. “We were literally still doing the sound mix on the finale [last week], and the writer starts this week, so it’s certainly early stages. Probably not a huge time jump, but there might be slight time jump.”

For two seasons, Amy was torn between her ex-husband, Michael (Omar Metwally), and her boyfriend Jake (Jon Ecker). She and Jake recommitted to their relationship in Episode 209 but their exes, with whom each shares a child, never left the picture. That escalated toward the end of the season when Jake and his ex-wife Rachel bonded over her cancer scare and when Amy and Michael spent time together in the woods while on a college trip with their daughter.

And then in the final minutes of the Season 2 finale, Amy seemingly ended it with both men, telling Jake, “You convinced us that we can deal with [our ties to our exes] but what if we can’t?” and Michael that “I can’t live in the past anymore, I need to move forward.”

Has Amy wiped the slate clean?

“Well, I think there’s what you say and what you think you want, an then the human heart may have other ideas,” Steinberg said. “For Jake and Amy, it’s been a little bit complicated since Rachel came back into the picture, Jake wasn’t completely forthcoming with Amy, and that made her suspicious.

“And of course, then she had this experience in the woods with Michael. And in truth, she never really moved on from Michael; she woke up and she thought they were married, and then he was not available. While he was not available, she went with Jake but there was a piece of her heart that was always tethered to Michael. Even the first time that Jake and Amy got back together in 209, Jake said, explicitly, there is part of you that is always going to love him, and there’s a part of me that is always going to love her.

“There’s a maturity to that. But then there’s also, can they escape it? We’re seeing that Jake does definitely still have a very big draw to his ex-wife, and Amy’s astute enough to know that’s probably going to get me hurt and I don’t feel solid and secure enough to risk it. Is she just pushing him away because when she gets scared, that’s what she does? I think we don’t totally know yet. I don’t know that she totally knows yet.”

Amy’s breakup conversations with both men came after she woke up after surgery to find out that terminally ill Joan (Felicity Huffman) had sacrificed the little time she had left by taking medication that allowed her to perform surgery that saved her former pupil’s life.

“I’ve given all I had now, but you Amy, you’ve got plenty more to give, so give,” Joan told Amy who promised her she will. And when Joan named Amy and Sonya co-Chief Residents, a couple of episodes back, she told her longtime friend, “It’s time for you to use your greatness to pull the greatness out of others.”

“She’s been told explicitly by Joan, her mentor, to stop with this nonsense of chasing one man or another,” Steinberg said. “It’s time to do service, it’s time to give back, it’s time to use your greatness to bring the greatness out of others. And that’s the gauntlet that has been thrown down to Amy.”

Amy echoed her mentor’s words when she was breaking things off with Michael romantically. “I need to be of service,” she told him.

Amy is making “what she believes, strong, decisive life decision” but at the same time, this “was a quick decision” — and clearly an emotional one too — so time will tell whether Amy will be able to stick to it, Steinberg cautioned.

“With Joan sacrificing herself to save Amy and then dying, I think Amy feels beholden to follow Joan’s advice,” he said. “It’s not bad advice, it’s good advice. Whether it’s completely what Amy should be doing, it obviously resonates enough and rings true that she’s taking the advice. She’s not a child, she’s not just listening to Joan. She’s being influenced by somebody that is attuned to her. We’ll see if her resolve to do these things will withstand the test in Season 3.”

Will we see more more of Rachel and Michael’s estranged wife Nora next season. Will they be drawn to their exes following Amy’s decision?

“Jake, we can feel is being pulled toward Rachel,” Steinberg said. “Michael is pretty resolved with Nora. They share a child, so there will always be that. But I think it’s pretty clear that he’s not in love with Nora, and Nora is resolved to that, and they’ve ended their situation amiably. So that’s where that is.”

Just before she closed the book — at least for now — on the Jake and Michael romances, Amy “met” a dashing trauma and cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Ben Grant, played by new series regular Blair Underwood. The quotes come from the fact that the two have history, which Amy does not remember due to her amnesia. While Ben admited to her that the two had met professionally at a medical symposium, the full extent of their acquaintanceship was not revealed until the very end of the finale in a major cliffhanger.

In it, Ben played an old birthday video message from Amy who reminisces about their rendezvous at the Four Seasons, how he makes her smile and that “I know I’m bad but I’m trying to be good.”

Like with Jake, when Amy had no recollections of their relationship after the accident and it took time to piece together enough memory fragments to realize that they had been together, she is likely facing the same with Ben who will join Westside next season.

“We can’t say how she’s gonna find out. Obviously, there’s a path there,” Steinberg said, declining to reveal what happened at the Four Seasons. “I think if you’re looking at that, you can see that they had an affair, but yeah, we will leave the suspense of that for the off-season.”

As for how quickly sparks will start flying between Amy and Ben, Steinberg was noncommittal.

“Well, there’s a history between them, and I think we’ll find some chemistry,” he said. “But how that plays out, I can’t really say yet.”

Factoring into Amy and Ben’s new relationship is the fact that he just saved her life. Ben was the lead surgeon who operated on her during lockdown, with Joan as his No.2.

Doc opened and closed Season 2 with major crisis episodes – a hostage situation involving a former patient of Amy’s that sent the entire hospital into lockdown in the premiere, and the deadly virus in the finale that put Amy’s floor under lockdown, with her life in grave danger both times.

It was “a conscious decision to have a loud episode to come out of the gate and to do something loud and cathartic at the end,” Steinberg said. “They feel very different and they’re both organically out of the DNA of the show.”

Doc is based on the 2020 Italian series Doc – Nelle tue mani. “We drew some things from it in Season 1; Season 2 there is no resemblance; it’s a completely different show at this point, except for the initial premise,” Steinberg said. “I don’t even know what they did in Season 2, I never even watched it.”

Season 2 of the Italian series, which aired in 2022, featured flashbacks at the height of the Covid pandemic. Season 2 of Doc did too.

First in Episode 209, set at the funeral of Jake’s father, which flashed back to the start of the pandemic when Amy and Jake’s decisive early action saved lives and forged a closer relationship between them. And now in the two-hour finale where the new virus brought back a lot of Covid memories for Amy.

“Obviously Covid was such a huge, transformative experience in all of our lives,” Steinberg said. “No one will ever forget 9/11, and then there was the aftermath, the domino effect that it created. But even that was essentially a single event on a single day whereas Covid was something that affected everyone for two full years, and it still has a very lingering impact on us, societally and culturally and psychologically and emotionally.”

He noted how the pandemic has been woven in the fabric of the show, sometimes in a smaller ways, like when a character mentioned in the premiere mentioned that he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to his dying wife because it was early days of Covid and he wasn’t allowed in the hospital.

“That’s just a fact of life, but it’s a very poignant one,” Steinberg said.

He addressed revisiting the pandemic in the Season 2 finale.

“I think everybody forgets what those doctors went through those first three, six months; that was so terrible and so difficult for them,” Steinberg said. “I’m not sure if we want to go back to doing an entire episode or something that’s in that time period again, but certainly it made sense that Amy, being in the finale in a lockdown situation, it would bring up those memories, and it was a good way for us to have a catharsis of her memories, which is what she’s been saying all season, that she really wants to get back her memories, and now they’re really tormenting her and debilitating her. It all felt organic with the trauma that’s happening in the present.”

One of the patients afflicted by the deadly virus was a man who came across as a conspiracy theorist. He initially refused antivirals and questions doctors’ methods, later explaining that he had followed guidelines during the pandemic but has since changed his outlook after seeing the impact remote learning had on his then 10-year-old on who’s become “a shell of himself.” The man ultimately agreed to receive a serum made from recovering Richard’s blood.

“He has become a conspiracy theorist and a denier and a doubter of all institutions because of what happened to him during Covid,” Steinberg said. “I think that character was really interesting to us because he represents a whole segment of the population. He’s not a full conspiracy nut but he’s someone that has so much skepticism and doubt about institutions that it’s getting him into trouble. Then we humanize that character because he has a story to tell about his son that he knows has damaged him, and I think many of us have either experienced that or know people who have experienced that, who had children who suffered during that time.”

There was a little bit of a wish fulfillment with the character who came around at the end and embraced medicine. Did the writers consider at any point killing him off?

“We thought very briefly; some of the patients were going to die, and should we kill him, but we thought that would be extremely didactic and preachy to have the conspiracy guy pay the price for his ignorance,” Steinberg said. “We didn’t want to do that, we felt that that would be a little bit cheap and easy. What we got to was that by the end, I wouldn’t say he became a believer; I think he was so desperate, he was quite sick by the end, he had no choice so he said yes.”

The man became one of the lucky ones who were randomly selected to get the three available doses of the serum, with the rest getting a placebo so none of them knew what they were given. He recovered and all he said to Amy on his way out was, “I got better so fast, I think I maybe got the real thing.”

“The irony also that all the people that believed in the medicine that didn’t get the random draw, that felt deliciously ironic, that the guy that never believed in it is the one that got it,” Steinberg said. “And then, there’s a pretty poignant moment at the end where he doesn’t go on and on to Amy that I was wrong, this is what I’ve learned. It’s a very small, underwritten moment where he acknowledges that he got the cure and he’s amazed at how well it worked. We wanted to keep it at that point; we really try on the show to say things and have the audience feel things, but to have some restraint about what we’re saying and not hit people over the head with it.”

Veteran actor Judd Hirsch played another sick patient, a Holocaust survivor celebrating his 90th birthday who contracted the virus after helping one of three entitled fraternity brothers he was sharing a hospital room with who was in distress. He did get the serum and survived.

“We wanted to have a variety of different characters that had different points of view and different ages, so it felt like an interesting idea to pair them,” Steinberg said. “He was a Holocaust survivor who had seen plenty of moral cowardice, and in a very small way, he was seeing the moral cowardice of the three fraternity brothers. We thought it was an interesting life lesson to be taught from somebody who’d gone through all that to be able to say that in life, very few situations are ever going to be as dramatic as, what would you do if you were in Nazi Germany, would you hide your neighbor or not? But there are smaller moments that all of us go through, and it’s just important to think about what’s moral, and standing up in those smaller moments.”

In the episodes leading to the finale, Gina became attached to Walter, a bright kid with a serious medical condition living in a group home and yearning to get a family of his own. She was contemplating adopting the boy but the topic was not addressed in the finale. Is Gina still thinking about it?

“The way we played that is that she’s flirting with adopting him, but I think she realizes it’s an impulsive idea, and that’s why she closes the computer,” Steinberg said. “But we are hinting at a feeling in her, whether it’s adopting that kid or maybe she’s having an itch as a woman in her mid 40s who doesn’t have a child. That was an Easter egg we’re planting as a potential storyline for her next season.

After Sonya pined for Jake over more than a season, she started getting closer, and TJ. By the end of Season 2, the duo are dating. Is their relationship the real deal, and is it something the series will explore next season?

“Yes. You see they’re in bed together at the end of the season and seem pretty happy and connected,” Steinberg said. “So yes, we’ll be following their relationship for sure next season.”

Over the first two seasons, Amy has been able to recover only bits and pieces of her lost memories. Will that continue to be a very slow process or will there be an Eureka moment when a switch will be turned on and she will have her memories back?

“We’re still playing with that, but her memory loss and potential memory recovery will always be in it,” Steinberg said.