I’ve conducted a number of Twitter polls about The Good Doctor and/or #Shea over the past few years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one that a) attracted so many votes, and b) netted so close a race.
I worded B, C, and D very carefully on purpose, and I think the results reflect a collection of viewers with very mixed emotions. Some wrote to me, telling me they’d clicked on one option when they meant to click another. Or that they’d changed their mind once they voted. Or that it was a toss-up between two options. 

If you were one of the 23% who summarized the 3-episode reality show arc as “a great addition,” I apologize in advance if you find this week’s analysis of “The Lea Show” to be an annoying laundry list of complaints. But more than half of the votes characterized the arc as something less than “an uneven bit of fun”. And that’s a problem, no matter when it happens. 

I’m just going to knock through episode 5x17 act by act, pointing out some “PROS” in an effort to counterbalance all the “CONS”.

ACT 1: “52 Hours…!”

It OPENS with Claire being interviewed by Sophie about Shaun… and there’s our first clue. Shouldn’t the question Claire was answering be starting with “When I first met Lea…?” But instead, the focus was immediately on Claire and Shaun… Not even Claire, Shaun, and Lea. It could’ve been Claire saying how she knew from the start that they were going to get together… because in her case, unlike the others that might be claiming it… It was probably true. But she never got the chance to answer that, because the only soundbite we know of for Claire in the reality show is one that kicked off “The Lea Show.”

Speaking of which…

CON: It was a misleading episode title (duh). Claire’s return was well-publicized; why try to be cutesy with the title when it was almost as much an episode about Claire as it was Shaun and Lea’s wedding/reality show stuff? It turns out the truth hurt; ABC’s Lea-free promo of “The Lea Show” was accurate. This was more “The Claire Show.”

(And unfortunately the high expectations not met for Lea left me a little resentful of Claire’s presence. That’s just silly, I know. I was looking forward to her return too, and I still appreciated seeing her there. But it turned into an epilogue on Claire’s evolution as a doctor that I’m not sure we needed.)

CON: It went by very quickly… but after Lim clarified for Shaun that Lucho was Claire’s patient, not her boyfriend, we saw Claire telling Lim “Sophie told me I could bring a ‘plus one,’ so I decided to go for it… apparently I have some leverage” as an explanation for Lucho’s presence. Really, guys? When “Andrews cleared the way for me to bring a patient up to St. Bon’s, so I went for it” would do just fine? 

Because if the implication was that Sophie was getting Hulu to pick up the tab on Lucho’s medical bills in addition to flying Claire in for the wedding… hah! No. Not buying it.

CON: Let’s just get this out of the way… What might the Lea-specific segments of the reality show in our mind’s eye have included?

CON: I think another frustrating aspect of this is the notion that #Shea Nation has been somewhat robbed of this wedding buildup. Yes, much has happened since Lea’s proposal… a rollercoaster’s worth, to be more precise, and yet in many ways it feels like it adds up to a whole lotta nothing. I’ll get into more detail about this after the season finale airs.

ACT 2 (yeah, we’re only on ACT 2!)

PRO: I enjoyed the idea of almost every doctor being involved in Lucho’s various surgeries (save for Jordan ‘playing hooky’ as Lea’s MOH, because sure, she’d be perfectly fine missing all that hospital excitement…! NOT!)

CON:... I just didn’t enjoy it happening as much in THIS particular episode because every Claire or Lucho scene had me growling in the distance this should be Lea time.

BIG, BIG CON: Sophie not knowing anything about Shaun’s family situation until Lea mentioned it. Not only did that leave me saying HOW COULD THAT BE??? (for any producer searching for “their story” as much as Sophie was would’ve known all that)... it killed any possibility of Sophie getting a hold of Shaun’s mom as a last-minute surprise guest. Which would have been in abominable taste, I know, and potentially destructive to the wedding day itself, which Sophie surely wouldn’t condone.

But the point of the conversation, in part, was for Sophie to discuss having “seat fillers” to make Shaun’s side of the church more on par with Lea’s side… introducing a layer of artifice we’d see later, literally, with Lea’s hair extensions.

PRO and CON: You know how there will be an OR scene on TGD, and you’re much more interested in the staff’s conversation than what’s happening on the table? Such was the case twice in this episode– once when Shaun got his first look at “The Gosling”-- as in RYAN Gosling– and again later, when #Parnick did their passive-aggressive bickering about the breadmaker gift. Anyway, the “pro/con” here is for the two conversation threads resulting from those scenes:

Gosling-chat: CON. We had Shaun at a sort of crossroads… does he tell Lea he doesn’t think the look & fit will work for him, or does he suck it up because he’s trying to please her above all else? Claire promptly hops on his shoulder (figuratively, of course) to assure him Lea would want his honest opinion, while Glassy starts reflecting on– what else– his 2 failed marriages. Next thing we know, Shaun is coming away with the impression that one must literally “wear the suit” in order to ensure marital success, and I’m thinking couldn’t Claire jump in at this point and say “Shaun, Dr. Glassman is talking in metaphors again. Please don’t take him too seriously.”

Because, honestly, there are times on this show when we are just one misunderstanding away from a standard-issue Three’s Company plot. And that’s no damn good.

(If you don’t get that reference, please look up Three’s Company right after you look up The Graduate… which I’ll explain later for those who don’t follow me on Twitter.)

(And no, there has not been a single mention yet of the tux that Shaun owns outright; the one he purchased in S1 at Andrews’ suggestion. And I suppose the one seen in the season finale isn’t going to be that tux either? Ugh. Big sigh.)

Breadmaker-debate continued: PRO. If you take away the possible serious overtones of the #Parnick breadmaker debate, You get some fun banter from a couple that definitely knows how to do that… And you get it in the OR setting, which doesn’t usually happen anymore because of Morgan’s limitations in that particular arena. As for the CON in this… It just struck me as more laughable than usual when Claire brought a halt to the crisis at hand, which led to everything stabilizing, which then prompted Andrews to jump back into the bread maker conversation with “ Myself, I’m a sucker for an ‘everything' bagel…” Just struck me as extra weird in this case.

ACT 4: “It is repulsive, but it’s your favorite”

ACT 5 — “What shows you care more than trying to do something that isn’t easy?”

P.S. So where was Lea during all this… was there a bachelorette party on ‘The Lea Show’? Why not?  We’ll never know… 

And wasn’t that little surprise gathering at the end of “The Shaun Show” supposed to be a dual bachelor/bachelorette party anyway?? UGH… the more things with this arc that don’t add up, the more frustrated I get. And we’ve still got another act and a half to go… 

PRO: Shaun and Claire’s scene at the nurses station (it’s overnight/early morning)... without a doubt it was a nice scene; many pointed to it as the best of the episode except for maybe the final few minutes. Claire was there at the beginning and saw Shaun through a whole lotta growth until she moved to Guatemala. And there was a very nice symmetry to Shaun “saving that little boy when no one else knew how” in the pilot episode, and saving another little boy under somewhat similar circumstances 5 years later. 

CON: But all the more reason it’s bizarre that Claire was brought in for a wedding she didn’t even get to see. I guess this scene is supposed to take the place of an actual wedding “moment” for them, which also means it supplants anything meaningful that could’ve happened between Claire and Lea. This might not be such a big deal if not for the fact that the last time they had a real conversation (not counting the group scene at the start of the episode), Lea was still mourning her unborn baby something fierce. I get that an acknowledgment from Claire on how far BOTH of them have come, in their own way, was not high on the priority list… all the more reason for annoying little bloggers like me to point it out. Hah! 

ACT 6— “Hell of a twist”

OK first of all, the obvious… Claire asked Shaun as he was running off at 6AM “What are you going to wear?” and he responded “I don’t know!” clearly does not jibe with the idea that he’d been working with that Gosling suit the night before.

But just as important a question: W H E N, exactly, did he do all that…??? 

When he was at St. Bon’s trying not to conclude Lucho would die? When he was back at St. Bon’s pulling an overnight miracle? Or was it in that brief window of time in the morning, when he should’ve been trying to get some sleep, and he was so tired he didn’t even realize “last night” was THAT MORNING? 

In other words, I’ll repeat: It makes no sense.

(I’d say it made as much sense as Glassman’s comment “Let’s hope the flower girl keeps up the pace”-- um, there’s a flower girl???-- except that I suppose Sophie brought one in at the same time she hired “seat fillers.”)

I’m sorry, everyone, but the thinking and challenging will continue. For just as Lea didn’t want Shaun to be represented on the reality show as “just someone with a lot of quirks”... I don’t want #Shea to be represented on TGD simply as a collection of precious moments and/or homages. They’re so much more than that. 

And the writers should know that better than any of us.

(A REMINDER TO EVERYONE…

WE MAY GET A LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS IN THE SEASON FINALE… AND MUCH AS WAS THE CASE WITH THE SEASON OPENER… REPRESENTATION MAY BE STRONG, BUT AS FOR SATISFYING OUTCOMES? WE’LL SEE.)