Will Amy’s Memories Come Back? ‘Doc’ Boss Weighs in

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Doc series premiere “If at First You Don’t Succeed…”]

There’s more than one mystery at the center of Doc, the new Fox drama about Amy (Molly Parker) after she wakes from an accident that cost her eight years of memories.

But one of them isn’t what caused the accident. The premiere reveals that she looked at her phone when test results came in. Below, showrunner Barbie Kligman talks about having that be the cause (versus someone hitting her), how Amy’s going to be dealing with her grief over her son’s death, her now ex-husband’s (Omar Metwally) new family, her relationship with fellow doctor Jake (Jon Ecker), and more. (Plus, read Parker’s breakdown of Amy’s life now here.)

Talk about having the accident happen after Amy looks at her phone for test results versus any sort of mystery or someone hitting her on purpose.

Barbie Kligman: It’s an accident caused, you could say, to some extent based on her own sort of superpower, which is also her shortcoming, right? She was there working two weeks straight, she was exhausted, she was driving home in the rain, and is so driven to help her patients regardless of how she may act around them, that she had to look at the email from the hospital right in that moment, which caused the accident. It was a function of her own workaholic, “I can’t stop” attributes.

And that makes sense for the story you’re telling because the focus is on her and how she’s learning about how she changed. At the end of the premiere, Michael tells Amy during their call that even at their worst, he was always her friend. But can they just be friends given that in Amy’s mind, she thought they were still married and happy?

Yeah, I think that would certainly not happen right away, if ever. Honestly, I’ve never been able to be friends with someone I felt more for. And that’s the worst scenario of it, right? That’s like a crush on crack, what they have. So, no. But I think what he was trying to say is very much that he’s there for her in this moment, regardless of no, she’s not going to be able to look at him as a friend. And yet right now there’s so much to process and there’s so few people to trust and he’s still the man she loves. Also she was calling him specifically, so I think he’s speaking to her reluctance to say what she wants to say.

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But he’s remarried and he has a baby on the way. What can you preview about when Amy finds out and how she reacts based on who she is now?

It’s big, when she finds out. Michael knows he should tell her, but for obvious reasons he can’t bring himself to, and Gina [Amirah Vann] wants her to know but knows it’s not her place to tell her. And so it’s a minute before she finds out because there’s also the issue of, she’s going through all this trauma, how much can you put on her right away? Obviously excessive stress isn’t going to help healing. So I think rather than rip off the bandaid except where necessary — because you saw in the pilot, it was necessary. If he didn’t tell her they were divorced, she would just expect that he was there for her fully. And if he didn’t tell her about Danny, there was no getting around that. But I think the other things he knows, Gina knows they can take a minute because too much too soon, I think, can do more harm than good. Also, he’s terrified to tell her this. It’s another smack in the face to someone who doesn’t remember that she was the one who left.

Then there’s this Dixon mystery that’s been set up, and right now, Amy doesn’t remember this and we know how it would’ve played out had this accident not happened because we saw that conversation between Amy and Richard (Scott Wolf) before it. But what can you preview about how that’s going to be playing out now? As Amy’s figuring out things, as she’s getting back into the swing of things at work, she’s figuring out her relationships with people, with Richard, and everything.

For a period, Richard absolutely thinks he’s in the clear, but there is a part of him that is worried. With a brain injury, you just don’t know. Her memories could come back at any time or never. And so a little bit, he’s on his heels at all times because now he’s also achieved the one thing that he’s always wanted [to be chief]. He wanted it by legitimate means, but he didn’t get it by legitimate means. I wouldn’t say they’re illegitimate, it’s just not the same as earning a position, right? But getting it because someone suffered a tragedy is not nearly as gratifying. So Richard’s always going to have it in the back of his mind. And I will say that there’s a tendency in life when you stop worrying about things for them to rear their ugly heads.

What can you say about Richard’s attitude about Amy and how much of it is it because of Dixon? What are we going to see about how the relationship was before all of this happened?

Yeah, Richard’s feelings are complicated. Amy remembers them as friends and trusted colleagues, so the way she behaves with him, which we’ll see in Episode 2, throws him for a loop because that’s not what he was used to. Richard barely remembers the time when they were friends, but that’s all that Amy remembers. And so it’s a very interesting dynamic when you put them together and Richard realizes that’s where she is in her mind. I think there’s a part of him that very much yearns for the time where they were colleagues and friends before tragedy struck and everything went the way it did. So there’s really interesting levels to their interactions because you are always wondering, what is he thinking right now? And by the same token, as she starts to find things out and realizes that she became chief, he wanted chief, she starts to put some things together. But some things are pretty well hidden and will take a lot more to be able to find them out.

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Before the accident, Amy responded to Jake’s “I love you” in kind, and based on the flashes that we see in the pilot, it looks like they were happy together. This was a real relationship. How would you describe it?

It was a real relationship, and I think that surprised her. I think she didn’t expect this to come into her life, which often happens — you meet someone, you might not expect to fall in love. But because he’s significantly younger and he works for her, she wasn’t asking for this, and yet he was able to sort of come in and penetrate the walls that she put around herself and make her happy for the first time in a very long time. But when she says “I love you” to him, she was pleasantly surprised to see she felt that way, too, because I think before that she thought they were having a fling and she thought they were enjoying themselves. And then when faced with that moment, she realized, I do love him, too.

Yeah, because it seemed almost like she wasn’t going to say anything, and that’s what he kind of expected. But then the accident happened, and all the memories of that relationship are gone, and he has to deal with that knowing that he’s keeping that from her. It’s inevitable that she’ll find out. What does that mean for what we’ll see between those two characters?

That’s another really interesting thing because whenever he’s in her presence, he’s thinking about what they had and experiencing the pain of her not remembering. When she’s in his presence, I think it doesn’t take long for her to feel a connection, but she doesn’t really understand that connection. And what’s interesting about that is it makes you look and go, do you need to know that you were with someone to want to be with them again? Or is it just something that’s sort of innate? Is the chemistry just something that attracts you? Nobody else knew about them, so there isn’t anyone else to tell her.

What can you say about what we’ll see in terms of any of her memories coming back?

It’s something she wants desperately to happen, and she is doing the treatments to try to get it to happen, but she’s also trying to get her life back. So at the same time, she’s focused on getting ready to take the boards and she wants desperately to pass them again because she wants to be an actual doctor again at this hospital rather than a medical student. Because it’s truly one of the only things she feels she has left, and it was such a big part of her life, and she’s not willing to let that go.

The more she hears about what she was like and learns about what she’s lost, is there any part of her that questions if she wants those memories back?

For sure. I mean, look, it’s like when she says in the pilot, “I lost my son, I lost my husband, maybe it’s better that I don’t remember.” But I think it begs the question for many of us of, “What part of our identities is our memory?” And so you’re faced with the conundrum of just because you can’t remember the day your son died, he’s still dead. And just because those weren’t the best of you in terms of your behavior… For me personally, I think I’d want to know, but I also think it’s very different for everyone. Some people would definitely say, “Let’s not pile on to what I’m going through. I’m sorry for how I was. That’s not who I am. Let’s just start fresh.”

Related

'Doc' Series Premiere Recap: Molly Parker Breaks Down What's Next for Amy

Yeah. You can’t pick and choose the memories you get back. 

Right, right, right. Exactly.

Speaking of her son, because for Amy, that grief is fresh again for her, but as Gina points out, the accident gives her the chance to do things differently. But how hard is it for Amy to not just do what she did in the past when it came to grieving? It would be totally understandable if she did because to her son just died in her mind.

Well, it’s so interesting for you to bring that up because there’s a couple things at play. First of all, our instincts are our instincts, right? But once she goes into Episode 2, she does know that she shut down. She does know that she didn’t let people in. She does have a general sense, if not the specific memory, of what she did. And as we get into Episode 2, we see her start to go down that path again. What’s amazing is seeing, knowing that she’s going down the wrong path, if she will make the necessary adjustments to actually do things differently or not. Or are we just who we are and doomed to repeat the same mistakes?

I have to say one of the relationships I especially enjoyed watching was Amy and Sonya (Anja Banerjee) throughout the season because of the differences between what it was and what it becomes. Can you talk about shaping that dynamic?

It was always interesting for us that, by and large, the way Amy behaved towards Sonya was in direct correlation to the tragedy she suffered and her — she’s absolutely a stickler for perfectionism, which I would argue, if ever there was a profession where it matters, it’s medicine. That said, there is a way to talk to people and Amy didn’t care about that. She didn’t care really about much of anything except saving her patients after the tragedy. And I think Sonya suffered the brunt of that, and it grew into a festering thing. But during our season, Sonya is faced with something pretty terrible that she has to deal with. And shockingly, the one person who’s there who sees it is Amy, and it makes you wonder, because they already don’t get along again in the present, largely because of how Sonya feels about her, which Amy doesn’t remember, how that’s going to play out. As bad as it gets between two people, there are certain things that happen that it’s interesting to see certain instances where people will rally together despite their differences.

Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox