It’s a good thing Dr. Richard Miller has that white coat to keep him warm: He’ll need it for all the cold shoulder he’s getting at Westside Hospital.
After declining a settlement with Westside and instead finagling his old job back, Dr. Miller (Scott Wolf) officially returned to work during Tuesday’s episode of “Doc,” a development that was uniformly met with side-eye from the other doctors. (Well, he received a little more than just side-eye from Amy, who pointedly warned him on his first day back, “One mistake, and I am taking you down.”)
During the course of the hour, Richard made a reluctant ally in Sonya (Anya Banerjee), who worked alongside him on a case — and he even went to bat for Sonya later in the episode, protecting her from potential legal trouble after she flubbed placing a central line in a patient. That patient ultimately pulled through, and Richard was altruistic once again as he helped the down-on-his-luck man get a job at Westside, to ensure he’d have a source of income while recovering from surgery.
The string of good deeds has us — and Sonya — wondering if perhaps the once-deceitful Richard is a changed man. But according to Wolf, his character has been this kind-hearted all along; he just needs the chance to remind his colleagues of that.
“One of the most beautiful parts about this character is that he’s all of us, in a sense, if something terrible happened where we made a terrible mistake and didn’t feel like we could own up to it, and then it just snowballed,” Wolf tells TVLine. “He legitimately did things that were bad [in Season 1], and he lied and deceived and, out of survival, hurt people that he cares about. We’re not going to see a Richard who doesn’t understand that. But there’s an authenticity to how he’s showing up right now. It’s going to take a long time for people to trust that.”
Flashbacks in Episode 16 reveal more of Amy and Richard’s relationship
And there’s further proof that Richard may not be the villain here. Tuesday’s episode also featured multiple flashbacks to eight years prior, which revealed just how friendly and collaborative Amy and Richard’s dynamic used to be. Not only did they make ideal partners for games of Celebrity, but Richard helped Amy cope with a particularly devastating loss of a patient at the hospital.
“You see Richard and Amy back in the day, and knowing that’s still underneath all of this, it’s so tragic to think that people meant that to each other and have lost it. Can they get it back?” Scott Wolf asks. “People who mean that [much] to each other in life — I don’t think that ever really goes away. The question is: Has everything that’s happened been too much for Amy to ever really come back, or do they have a chance?”
Amy and Richard’s chilly first encounter when he returned to Westside — a conversation where Amy told him, in no uncertain terms, that she’ll get him ousted after his first slip-up — would seem to indicate no chance of reconciliation. Wolf, though, feels slightly more optimistic.
“He knew [seeing Amy again] was going to be some version of difficult. I don’t know that he could have imagined it cutting to a chase like that, where she pulls no punches and does not ease into things at all,” the actor says with a laugh. “But his belief is, ‘Now I can just be myself, and I have to believe that’s enough.’ Whether it will be or not remains to be seen, but we don’t see a guy cowering around, trying to be careful. We see a guy owning who he’s always been and trusting that, hopefully, it’ll be enough.”
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