Season 2, Episode 10 — Molly Parker Interview

The following post contains spoilers for the “Doc” Season 2 winter premiere.

The good news? Dr. Amy Larsen got some old memories back!

The bad news? Well, Dr. Amy Larsen got some old memories back.

Fox’s “Doc” resumed its sophomore season on Tuesday night, with Amy (Molly Parker) and her fellow doctors treating three separate patients that they eventually realized were all involved in the same incident and had all been exposed to the same toxin. Two of the patients pulled through just fine, but tragically, the third — a sweet teenage boy — suddenly went into cardiac arrest while getting treated, and the team could not revive him despite 30 solid minutes of compressions. 

Amy was tasked with consoling the boy’s parents out in the hallway, and as they watched their son pass away, Amy was hit with new memories of her son Danny’s death: a snapshot of the phone call where Amy got the bad news from Michael; a quick scene of Amy crying in an empty room at the hospital; and fragments of Danny’s funeral. 

Of course, Amy didn’t let those new memories derail her professionalism, and she waited until a private moment with Jake later in the episode to reveal that she’d remembered more of Danny’s death. But the way series star Molly Parker sees it, Amy is glad to have recalled those moments of her late son, tragic though they might be.

“Anything that has to do with Danny, she wants,” Parker theorizes to TVLine. “She wants all of that. The grace of her situation is that she’s not traumatized in the same way she was the first time when losing him. Her experience of it is different this time.”

Below, Parker further unpacks the events of the midseason premiere, including her thoughts on the ever-evolving love triangle between Amy, current beau Jake, and ex-husband Michael. Keep scrolling for her insights, then grade Tuesday’s episode in our poll.

TVLINE | This is a big episode for Amy, not least because she’s gotten back some key memories of Danny. Would it be fair to say that these are the first retrieved memories she might not want back? Or is it your feeling that Amy wants to re-experience the full spectrum of what she’s been through?Oh, lord. That’s a very good question. At the beginning of this season, Amy comes into this realization that she’s really in this liminal space where she can’t move forward, she can’t go back. There are these realities, like Michael’s remarried, he has a baby — these very concrete obstacles are in her way, and she comes to believe that without recovering her memories, she can’t reconcile these two parts of herself, and she can’t move forward. Along with that, she starts to feel that on top of the personal relationships, she’s also not the doctor that she was, and that just makes her crazy. I always imagined that Amy was a woman who does have an innate, intuitive sense of figuring out what’s wrong with people. But I also really believe that, in the years after Danny died, in order to just get through and stay alive, the best she could do was just work. That was the best she could do, even though it wasn’t good for her daughter, her marriage — it was the best she could do, and that obsession made her into an extraordinary doctor. Like many, many people who become masterful at what they do, it includes a degree of obsession, you know? So for her to realize and believe that she doesn’t have that anymore — it’s really unsettling for her. That’s really a core part of her identity all through these three different eras of Amy that we’ve come to know.

So, back to your question — there probably are things… [trails off] I don’t know. If you ask someone, “Are there things you wish you could forget?” Of course, we all have things that we wish didn’t happen to us, and if you live long enough, everything happens. You lose people that you love, you get fired from a job, you run out of money. All the things happen, and all we have is how we respond to them. We can’t control the outside. That’s the wisdom you get with age. All you’ve got is how you relate to the world, and Amy’s still learning that, you know? All that to say: I think anything that has to do with Danny, she wants. She wants all of that. The grace of her situation is that she’s not traumatized in the same way she was the first time when losing him. Her experience of it is different this time. She’s not carrying this heavy, heavy weight around with her in the same way that Michael is, because she doesn’t remember the phone call, she doesn’t remember all of the pain. And yet, she’s desperate to have some part of [Danny] back. I think any part — even if it’s the end, the worst part — she’s grateful for.

TVLINE | Amy’s also in this push-and-pull situation as it relates to her job: She wants her memories back, but the process of retrieving them has been putting her in physical danger, but without her memories, she doesn’t seem to be fully trusted in a leadership position at work. How will those different elements play out in the rest of the season?The writers have done something really interesting in terms of how she’s getting these memories back. They’re not full memories most of the time; they’re these tiny bits, these little images, recurring images that have some feeling attached to them. What she comes to believe is that her mind is trying to give her just enough of what she needs — just enough to magically deal with the patient in front of her, or just something that she needs to know, which is a really interesting way to do it. It’s one thing to say, “I want all my memories back.” It’s another thing to get these tiny little pieces that have no context, that may or may not even be true, you know? 

The other part that came up, and we had a lot of discussions about it, is: What is her ambition? Amy was drawn as this character who at least became a very ambitious person in the wake of Danny’s death. She became the chief of internal medicine at the hospital, and in the very first episode of the first season, she told us, “But I never wanted to be chief. That isn’t even part of what I wanted for myself.” I think she had a more balanced life [before Danny’s death], or as much as any doctor can who’s been in school for 15 years. But in this new Amy, she’s trying to figure out, “Do I care about that? Do I care about being the boss?” What Amy wants is to practice medicine. She wants to be the doctor that she was before. She wants to have that confidence in her own intuitive sense of what’s going on with people. She wants to be the diagnostician that she was before.

She also starts to run into a lot of conflicts with her coworkers because she’s kind of a fiery person — then and now. It’s conflicts where she’s not trusted by others, and she has a brain injury! It’s completely understandable that she should be where she is in the pecking order. But in Episode 10, she finally comes head-to-head with Sonya, and Amy’s done apologizing. She’s been carrying around a lot of shame because she can’t remember the last eight years of her life, and she’s been told by everyone, “You were awful.” [Laughs] “You were this horrible person.” And it’s one of the great gifts of [Felicity Huffman’s] Joan this season. She comes in this season and says to Amy, “You did the best you could. I thought you did great. Given everything? You were fine.” It’s the first person that isn’t coming with this intense judgment that [Amy] can’t access or do anything about. By the time we get to Episode 10, Amy has really, really tried to be good, to be the person that everyone wants her to be, to take responsibility for who she was before, even though she can’t remember it. But at the end of the day, she’s a doctor, and she knew something intuitively [about her patient in Episode 10], and she wasn’t listened to, and someone died.

TVLINE | I’ve gotta ask about the love triangle.Of course.

TVLINE | The fans are so invested, even in the comments on our fall finale post. Tell me what you think Amy feels for each of those men right now.It is possible to love two people. What I think, what Molly thinks, is that Amy can’t possibly know who she should be with without finding out who she is. How could she know? How could she really trust those feelings and instincts? It’s very tricky. Her past with Michael — he was her person, he was her family. So there’s love, but there’s also a deep attachment there. He’s the person she wants to go to when she can’t see straight, when these memories are coming so quickly. She ends up in his office again and again.

And yet, Jake, in both the past and the present — even though she can’t remember when she knew him before — has kind of a chemical, calming influence on her. There’s something about him where her whole nervous system is better when he’s around. [Laughs] And there’s attraction, there’s sexual chemistry, romantic chemistry, all of those things, but I also find the character of Jake to have this grounded earthiness that’s so different from Amy, who’s living up in her brain all the time. It’s good for her, and she seems to know instinctively that Jake is good for her. So, those are difficult things. It’s an interesting thing in terms of storytelling, because it’s the tension of the triangle that makes it interesting, you know? It’s not really in resolving the triangle. Then it’s not a triangle anymore. … I don’t know how any of it works out. [Laughs] Nor how it should. I have no idea.

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