‘Doc’: Scott Wolf Explains Richard’s Major Lie to Amy & Teases Finale Fallout

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Doc Season 1 Episode 9 “What Goes Up…”]

All season long, Richard (Scott Wolf) has been covering up the role that he played in a patient’s death. Amy (Molly Parker) had been suspicious before her accident, but after she lost eight years of memories, he thought he was in the clear. However, she’s started looking into what happened to Dixon, and in the penultimate episode of Doc Season 1, Richard offers an explanation that paints Amy as the one responsible.

With Amy asking questions, Richard needs an alternate story, his lawyer explains. Amy finds out that when Dixon coded, Richard was the one to push the amiodarone, and so she confronts him, accusing him of mistakenly picking up metoprolol. She thinks she figured it out before her accident and that’s why he was so keen to get rid of her. But he tells her that she gave Dixon the metoprolol. A few weeks before he died, he was treating him for complications from pneumonia, he had mild pulmonary edema, and his blood pressure was high. Richard says he wanted to treat with diuretics, but Amy didn’t feel like that was enough and ultimately wrote him a prescription for metoprolol without his knowledge and failed to put it in his chart. He tells her that’s what she was like as chief: micromanaging, marching around like she and she alone could do job, and spread so thin, she made mistakes. He insists he’s been covering for her.

“Richard’s hand is forced,” Wolf tells TV Insider, and it’s only then, as “he’s starting to feel like things are crumbling” and “threatening to collapse around him and ruin him” that he comes up with that lie since “he’s not a lifelong criminal.” All he’d wanted was for this to just go away and no one — himself or Amy — to get hurt since it was “a tragic mistake.”

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Once Richard is going to come up with an alternate story, “the endgame becomes, well, ‘Since she doesn’t really remember details and would have no way of knowing them, what if this picture could turn into I’ve been protecting you?'” explains Wolf. “‘Maybe the best way to make it go away is to tell her she had made a mistake and not reported it and that I had been covering for her. And if that’s the case, then obviously she wouldn’t try and come after me for anything if I had been protecting her.'”

Richard is ready to move on after that lie. As he sees it, “No one needs to know that this happened, but it is a Rubicon that he has crossed to put her in a position where she has to believe that she was the person who made this terrible mistake,” Wolf says.

Looking ahead to the finale, “we’re so close to this area that Richard has worked so hard to protect, and now that Amy has been told this thing, now she’s been told that she was responsible for this mistake, that I was covering it up this whole time for her sake, just knowing her character, it’s going to spin her out. And so at this point, I think Richard has lost control of the situation in ways that he hoped he would never. It’s impossible for someone like Amy to just leave it alone. It’s impossible for Richard now to just pretend it doesn’t exist. And so they’re heading towards a confrontation,” Wolf previews. “‘What Goes Up…’ ‘…Must Come Down’ are the titles of Episodes 9 and 10. Things have gone up and stuff’s coming down.”

Doc, Season 1 Finale, Tuesday, March 18, 9/8c, Fox

From TV Guide Magazine

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